


Thirty Three and a Third

by onemillionandnine



Category: The Lone Gunmen (TV), The X-Files
Genre: Abortion, Anal Sex, Bad Parenting, Drug Use, F/M, Foot Jobs, Loss of Virginity, Oral Sex, Vaginal Sex, bad decision making by teenagers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-06
Updated: 2016-06-29
Packaged: 2018-06-06 16:31:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 9
Words: 58,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6761599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onemillionandnine/pseuds/onemillionandnine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To discover who you really are, you have to leave your preconceived notions behind.</p>
<p>Since we all know, or at least want to believe, the Lone Gunmen's deaths were faked, the next logical question is where did they go? And what are they up to now?<br/>In the spirit of full disclosure I will admit I went overboard on the tags and warnings, most of the truly awful things happen off screen as it were and are discussed through the filter of time.<br/>In part this is an experiment to see if I am capable of editing and posting a story on my own, without my usual partner, who is not the Langly aficionado I am.</p>
<p>for the younger members of the crowd the title refers both to the age of the protagonist when the story takes place and the speed at which LP records were traditionally played.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Hell is Other People, and Cattle

**Author's Note:**

> Thank You to TooHipAnna who read my initial 30 page story and demanded more, even though she was totally unfamiliar with the characters.

“Bein’ dead sucks!” I wailed on the cheap motel room bed, one arm thrown over my eyes.

As motel rooms went it was extra shitty. The comforter on one bed was slit down the middle and one had a scary-ass stain, both had mirrors on the ceiling.

“Count your blessings, while our current situation may not be ideal, it is preferable to actually dying,” Byers said, it was like taking your fucking grandma with you into witness protection. Maybe not my grandma; she’d have slapped me on the back of my head and given me a bowl of something that tasted like library paste to eat, but definitely somebody’s grandma. 

“You’d bitch if they hung you with a new rope, just because you aren’t stuffing your face with all-you-can-eat shrimp and playin’ Lord Manhammer with your little friends it’s no reason for the rest of us to have to listen to you bitch,” Frohike said pulling a slice of pizza out of the box.

“I haven’t missed a Def Con since ‘90, dude, and now instead of boobs and lobster I’m stuck in here with you assholes, next to the freaking stock yards,” I said “Fuckin’ Oklahoma City. Fuckin’ unbelievable. Might as well be fucking Siberia. Or Nebraska.”

“Langly,” Byers whined, he actually freaking whined at me “I can’t believe you persist in this exploitative attitude towards women.” 

“Shhhhh right, the only one being exploited last time we were in Vegas was the 32 year old virgin over here,” Frohike said.

“Screw You, Asshole,” I said.

Besides I turned 33 last month.  
Why, oh fuckin’ why, of all the losers at the ‘89 Baltimore Electronics Convention did I get saddled with those two?

 

“I mean it, you two, 85% of sex workers report childhood sexual abuse, almost always from a family member. Average age of first sexual experience is five years earlier than the rest of the population,” Byers said looking at me and Hickey like somebody’s disappointed mom.

“Listen, Byers, Blondie wasn’t talking about picking up a streetwalker and finally becoming a man. All the guy wants is to get a look at a pair of tits in 3D for a change and in exchange pay some nice girl’s rent while she works her way through college,” Fro said “there’s a big difference between your average titty dancer and an honest professional.”

Trust Fro to make me feel even more like a loser while coming to my defense, gee thanks.

“So you’re telling me there’s no exploitation involved in paying a woman to sit on your lap?” Byers said.

“If this poor schmuck is hard up enough to pay a girl not to scream and run away once he gets within arms reach I think the young lady in question is providing a valuable service to the community,” Frohike said “Besides we owe it to the hard working women of the world to support their endeavors. Remember Caramel Swirl?”

“While it is commendable, simply because one exotic dancer is able to work her way through graduate school it doesn’t necessarily follow…” Byers said.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I jumped off the bed and grabbed my copy of the room key, and started counting out 1/3 of the stack of cash Skinner left us until our new identities were in place. 

“Hey, kid, where you goin’?” Hickey asked.

“Langly?” Byers asked, all innocent.

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t think of anything to say. Instead I slammed the door behind me and kept walking. 

I didn’t have a clue where I was going, I just walked. I hadn’t gone too far, maybe a mile when a billboard waved at me like, I dunno, someone nice and friendly.

GIRLS  
LIVE GIRLS  
TOPLESS GIRLS

If I couldn’t go to Vegas this year at least I could pretend.

~~ 

It was not Vegas.  
It wasn’t even Reno.  
It was practically the Salvation Army of strip clubs.  
I mean all strip clubs, and even bars, look like shit once the lights come up, but this one looked crappy even in the dark.

There couldn’t have been more than 8 or 9 other guys in the joint.  
The girls looked okay, tired, but okay.  
I shoulda guessed the beer would be like piss but I ordered one and drank it anyway.

The girl kind of half-assed moving to the music on the stage had blonde hair and smaller tits than Frohike.

There were other girls kinda hanging out, hustling drinks, or whatever. 

I had another beer and thought about what it might be like. You know, to actually, you know, with a real live girl. 

The least I could ask was for some hottie to sit on my lap for a few minutes.

When I thought about it from Frohike’s perspective it wasn’t so bad, you know, helping some girl out with tuition.

Then again according to Byers sticking a twenty in a g-string practically made a guy a perpetrator.

Between ‘em those two could fuck-up a free lunch. They weren’t even with me and they were still keeping me from having a good time. Fuck you, Byers, and Fuck you, Frohike.

I must have started to say something to one of the girls kinda floating around the place about a dozen different times, but when it came down to it I couldn’t bring myself to even make eye contact.

Kinda goes a long way toward explaining my spectacular success with women, huh?

And then a girl with medium sized tits and long straight black hair like a waterfall shouted in my ear. And by medium I meant medium for the joint which was dead center between Frohike and smuggling a pair of actual watermelons inside her shirt, so like big tits but not a freak of nature, not that I got anything against freaks of nature.

She’d sit on my lap for ten bucks a song. She asked me, I didn’t have to make the first move.  
Thank you, Jesus.

I pulled out my wallet and it was totally worth it.  
I closed my eyes and grabbed the sides of the chair to keep from putting my hands some place I hadn’t paid for. 

Still totally worth it, pretending, for just a minute, that it might go farther.  
That I didn’t have to pay a girl to touch me.  
That I didn’t totally suck at this.

But I did.  
I sucked hard at anything involving two XXs side by side, unless you’re talking math; I kick ass at math.  
Girls, though?  
I like ‘em, a lot. I’m just not any good at ‘em.   
In school I was a few years younger than everybody else. I didn’t even get what the big deal was about girls until my first year of college. 

 

By then I was kinda late to join the party, nevermind that chicks that age are usually looking for a guy with pubic hair as a minimum requirement.

It seemed like the harder I tried the worse I fucked it up.  
A couple of times it seemed like it might actually happen, but no cigar.  
I always managed to do or say something that nipped the whole thing in the bud as soon as there was any suggestion of, you know, a suggestion.  
The funny part was I never could figure exactly where I fucked up, I just knew that look. That “go away, Ringo,” look.  
That “get out of here, loser,” look.

And then the song was over so I gave her another ten dollars to stay. It was like when I was a kid and you had to feed quarters into the arcade machines until you got good enough to keep it going for hours with a single quarter.

I was never going to be any good at this. I told myself to memorize every detail so I could play it back for myself on days when I was broke and lonesome, which were all too common in my experience.

I leaned back a little and looked at her spine, committing everything I could to memory. She was slouched forward a little, she had a plum sized bruise right above the top of her g-string starting to turn green around the top edge. The bottom edge was inside her panties. I could see the ribs in her back. She had a scar on the side of her knee and a constellation of moles on the outside of her left thigh in the configuration of the big dipper. 

She was kinda little bitty, like Scully-sized. So it was pretty easy for me to hang over her shoulder and get a better look at her face, so I could, you know, commit that to memory for future reference, too. She had heavy black hair and her make-up was kinda Goth-lite. In the low light she looked either Korean or Mexican, depending on how the shadows fell. She had full, I guess the word is pouty, lips and a little snub nose. Pretty Pretty. The kinda girl you automatically think about kissing but know would never let you in a million years.

When the song stopped I gave her three tens at once. I was sick of struggling with my wallet in between every song.

“Aren’t you going to say anything? Do anything?” she shouted over the sound of other people talking, and the clinking of glasses, and the thunk of the ice machine.

“No,” I yelled, back.

Seemed like there was some kind of strip club etiquette I was fucking up, some how. 

Just My Luck.  
“Is it okay if we just sit here?” I asked.

“It’s your money,” she shouted as the music started “It’s just kind of uncomfortable.”

It took me a second to realize what she meant, I was holding onto my chair to keep myself from hanging onto her. She was balanced on my lap but I’m kind of bony and she looked like she was making an effort not to slide off…plus I had my inhaler in my pocket.

“Hang on,” I said “get up for a second.” And I pulled out my inhaler, rolled it up in my shirt sleeve “That better?” I asked.

She nodded and sat back down on my lap and stayed there for the three songs I’d paid for.

Then she jumped up.

I think it was the beers but I grabbed her hand “Where you going?” I asked.

The bartender gave me a look from behind the bar like he was prepared to kick my ass if I didn’t let go of her real quick, so I did,

“I need a cigarette,” she said “I’ll get you another girl.”

“I don’t want another girl,” I said, surprising myself.

“Then I’ll come back after I have my cigarette, but I really need a smoke, okay?” she said.

I nodded. I waited and I also drank two more beers.   
Thinking the whole time about what Byers and Frohike had to say, like I had one of them sitting on either shoulder. Like those old cartoons and shit, except in the cartoons it’s usually an angel and a devil, you know, with horns and a pitchfork, instead of a couple of guys who seemed like they had a pact to take turns ruining my life.

It was reassuring to picture her, and I felt like a dumbass for not asking her name yet, standing in some university book store blowing those tens I peeled off on an overpriced physics textbook. 

Without my particularly wanting him to Byers leapt to mind. 85% rate of childhood sexual abuse, he said. Well maybe, maybe not her, though. She could still be part of the lucky 15%. It wasn’t impossible. She was so little it seemed extra awful to imagine, and it made me feel pretty gross about paying her to sit on my lap. Like, there I was, one more asshole loser in her life, pawing her like a dog, because I was fundamentally unlovable, but the fact that I had cash meant I still got to inflict these feelings on somebody. And she was desperate enough to take the job. The more I thought about it the sicker I felt about how turned on she made me. Man, was I turned on.

 

Then she came back.  
And I had about a million questions for her. I looked in my wallet. I had ten 20s and eight 100s. Fuck it, I gave her a 100. 

“I’m kinda doin’ a survey,” I asked “Could I ask you a couple of questions?”

She held the 100 between two fingers and stopped like somebody hit her with a freeze ray.

“Okay,” she said slowly her eyes slitted.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Kitty,” she said leaning close. Her breath smelled like booze now, and something hard, not like, just a beer. Booze and cigarettes.

I rolled my eyes. Kitty Cum was on the marquise.

“Your real name,” I said. 

She looked me up and down.

“For the survey,” I said.

“Aren’t surveys ‘sposed to be anonymous?” she said, and she had me there.

I stumbled for a minute.

“My name’s Richard. Richard Langly,” I said. Fuck witness protection. I mean, what did it matter? Who exactly was a stripper in Oklahoma going to tell? 

“Jeanie Yellow Bear,” she said.

Oh. Okay. That’s what she was.

“Are you, like, in school or anything?” I asked loud over the music.

“You mean college? Am I in college?” She asked like I was crazy.

“Yeah,” I nodded.

Jeanie shook her head and sat down on my lap. 

Making her tell me her name seemed to piss her off alittle.  
“What’s Jeanie short for? Jeanette?” I sort of shouted in her ear. It looked like a little seashell. If I’d had a few more beers I would have traced the spiral on the inside with my finger.

She looked straight ahead and shook her head.

“What is it? Like…” I thought for a second “Eugenia?”

Jeanie froze again turning slowly to give me a dirty look over her shoulder, but she didn’t shake her head and she didn’t say no.

Eugenia. Ha. So umm Genie not Jeanie. I had to remind myself not let go of the chair and squeeze her. A girl named Eugenia was a lot more…I dunno, accessible, than one named Kitty or even Jeanette.

I would have been doing pretty good if Byers hadn’t been nagging me in the back of my head. Asshole wasn’t even there and he managed to get in the way of my good time.

Social situations aren’t exactly my strong suit, but even I figured it was kinda awkward to ask a stranger in the middle of a crowded bar if they had a childhood history of sexual abuse.

So I went to Byers other statistic. 

“Age at first um ...um ...sexual contact,” I said with my mouth right against her ear.

“11,” she answered, not looking either proud or embarrassed. Looking like she didn’t give a shit about me or my questions.

I counted out what grade people were usually in at that age. Somewhere out there some lucky guy had the best fucking 6th grade year ever.

She turned like a shot. Ooops. I never mean to say it out loud.

“He was 34,” she shouted in my ear and I wanted to die.

Without particularly wanting to I let go of the chair and put my arms around her waist.   
Eugenia kept her eyes straight ahead and her back stiff.

I bent down and put my forehead against her spine and she just got stiffer. She didn’t try to get away but it was pretty fucking obvious she was uncomfortable, so I let go.

“Sorry,” I shouted in her ear, not sure if I was apologizing for grabbing her, or for the guy that did it to her when she was just a kid, or maybe just…I dunno, all of it.

Eugenia gave me another dirty look, but that was cool, I earned it fair and square.  
With a little help from Byers.  
“Let me guess, junior-senior prom, in your dad’s car,” she yelled in my ear, seeming even more pissed off, that was kind of balanced out by the fact that a very pretty girl had her mouth against my ear.

It was my turn to shake my head. How about NEVER, Alex, for 500. Not that I said that.

“High School, though, right?” Eugenia squinted at me over her shoulder.

I shook my head, and she looked forward blankly. I figured she was trying to work out whether to guess higher or lower but a few seconds later she stood up.

“I don’t wanna be your friend,” she shouted in my ear, I could feel her breath.

“I don’t blame you,” I shouted back.

“I gotta go to the bathroom” she shouted.

“Come back,” I said wishing I could make her promise. I wanted, I dunno, to get to the bottom of this, this, man-woman power thing, like I would if it was a story for the paper. 

I ordered another beer. That made seven. I think it was seven red party cups of watery piss-beer.

I tried to reason it out.  
I had money, which Eugenia wanted.  
Scratch that, needed. Money’s pretty fucking necessary if you want to do shit like…oh … I dunno, live indoors and eat food.

So I had money. Not a ton but enough that I could afford to blow some of it on strippers.  
Eugenia had…herself, you know, a pretty face and a hot little body…which I might not need, but I wanted pretty bad. I didn’t want to buy her, exactly, just sort of rent her proximity. Was that shitty of me? I didn’t want to be shitty, but I didn’t want to be alone in a motel bathroom giving myself a repetitive stress injury from jerking off either. I tried to reason it out.

When she was a kid none of the power had been hers, and even now I probably came out on the winning side of the equation. So why did I feel like such a loser?

I wanted to do something to make things more fair for her but I couldn’t figure out what the fuck that might be.

Then Eugenia came back and she walked a little slower, but she was smiling. Smiling was good, right?

I tried to pull another hundred out of my wallet but she stopped me “I’m up in a little bit,” she said and sat down on my lap. I was kinda torn by the desire to see her , you know, do her deal and the urge to pretend...I dunno...she was just a regular girl. I had to admit the regular girl thing was a stretch since she was both topless and unreasonably hot. She seemed a lot softer since she came back from the bathroom, which seemed like a good thing. Neither of us said anything, either, which, knowing me, was probably a good thing, too.

I tried not to think about…you know…any of it. I did my best to focus on her little body on my lap and the way her hair smelled, like perfume and cigarettes and girl.  
Instead of the lecture Byers was giving me in my head.

Then Eugenia fell off my lap, splat, onto the floor.  
The bartender rushed over, and two other girls rushed over, and a fat bald guy came out of the back shouting.

“Did that fucking junky whore nod out, again?” he didn’t try to pick her up, just stood there looking pissed off “I told her one more time and she was out on her ass.”

And it was my fault. 

The other girls looked like they couldn’t decide whether to stick their necks out for her or not.

“Get her ass outta here,” the bald fat guy said to the bartender.

Genie was blinking when the bartender picked her up.

“Where you taking her?” I asked.

“Nowhere, really,” the bartender said picking her up like she was made out of tissue paper “Out to her car, she can sleep it off there until she’s good enough to drive home.”

I watched him carry her off and I thought about Mulder drilling holes in his head, trying to get the nightmares out.

I waited maybe 20 minutes. I even let another girl sit on my lap for one song. I didn’t have another beer though. I barely paid attention to the other girl. I couldn;t stop worrying about what was gonna happen to Eugenia.

Then I left and walked around back to the parking lot.

Eugenia’s car was a piece of shit; a Dodge Aries station wagon, mid-eighties, more primer than paint with a nasty dent in the side.  
She was sitting up rubbing her face but she was having a really tough time keeping her eyes open. 

She was barefoot, with her 4 inch heels in the passenger seat, dressed in grey sweat pants and a t-shirt that read COMANCHE TRIBE OF OKLAHOMA.

Once again I had Byers and Fro’ sitting on my shoulders, offering advice.

The female of the species is a different animal, than us, the smartest thing is to let her be, Kid, imaginary Fro’ said.

Ringo, imaginary Byers said, Women are people; They want the same things as you and I.

The question was, what did I want? Probably not, based on personal experience, the same things as Byers. What did Eugenia want? I did not have a fucking clue but…I watched her trying her keys in the ignition one by one. She probably did not want to wind up in a hunk of twisted steel and metal on the side of the road, that one’s pretty universal.

I knocked on the glass and she jumped about a foot in the air, but she did roll down her window.

“You’re too fucked up to drive,” I said.

She blinked.

“I promise I won’t lay a hand on you,” I said “I just don’t wanna see you get hurt.”

Eugenia squinted like she couldn’t remember who the fuck I was, that was how fucked up she was. I mean I’m sure she’d sat on a lot of laps in the course of her job but it had been 15, maybe 20 minutes tops.

She squinted at me harder.

“My name’s Richard Langly. I’m from Washington D.C. by way of Nebraska, which sucks by the way. I’m here in the witness protection program, and I’m a 33 year old virgin so you don’t have to worry about me tryin’ anything. I’m too chickenshit,” I said feeling embarrassed and pissed off, both at once.

It didn’t matter where they put me, the things I hated most about my life couldn’t change because no matter where I was I would still be me, I would still be scared and awkward and fuck things up.

“Why are you telling me this?” she asked barely able to keep her eyes open.

“Because I want you to give me your keys and let me drive you home,” I said “You’re too fucked up to drive and you’re probably too fucked up to remember anything I tell you.”

She tried to hand me her keys but dropped them under her car.  
No big deal, it’s pretty well established grubbing around on my belly was pretty far from the most humiliating thing I’d done that day. 

“Where do you live, Genie?” I asked dusting myself off but she was passed out again.

Just my fuckin’ luck. I always knew I was constitutionally incapable of catching an even break.

I shoved her over to the passenger side and found her purse in the floor boards. In her purse Eugenia had a driver’s license, a tribal ID, a blockbuster card, and a bunch of mail.  
Excellent, now I had an address. Oklahoma City is huge, the biggest city, geographically, in the US. So it took awhile to get her to her house but I got her there. There was a car in the drive and the name YELLOW BEAR on the mailbox,, and yeah, it was three a.m. so I knocked on the door so I could hand her over to her room mate.

A handsome, I mean really handsome, better looking than Jimmy Bond, guy opened the door “Who the fuck are you and why are you at my door at 3 in the morning?”

“Nice manners, Dude,” I said “I’m just tryin’ to bring Eugenia home.”

“Eugenia doesn’t live here, not anymore,” he said holding up his bare left hand “note the place where her ring isn’t on my finger?”

“You think you might be willing to let her crash here tonight?” I asked.

Mr. Handsome leaned out the door and “She nodded out in the car? I can’t see, I’m not wearing my glasses.” 

“Yeah, pretty much,” I admitted.

“Dude, I don’t know what to tell you but she cannot stay here. She’s disappointed our kids too many times to let her chaotic ass back in their lives, especially when she’s usin’,” Mr. Handsome said. And I could definitely see his point. I bet those kids were gorgeous, though.

“She have like, a place to live or a boyfriend or anything?” I asked “I get it about the kids, dude, but homegirl’s like just lost her job and I’m tryin’ to take her home.”

“Great,” Mr. Handsome said “So no child support this month either, and I gotta buy school clothes.”

“How much she owe you?” I asked.

“1500,” Mr. Handsome said “as of next week.”

I opened my wallet and gave him 800 bucks courtesy of the witness protection program and Walter Skinner, “This is all I got, you can take it off her tab. You don’t know any place she can stay?”

“Her boyfriend’s her dealer and I don’t really know exactly where they live,”

“Thanks…uh,” I said, because the guy didn’t have to be as nice as he was.

“Jimmy,” Mr. Handsome said, what was it about that name? “Thanks for trying to look out for her crazy ass…uhh.”

“Richard,” I said and shook his hand then I got back in the car trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do. I sure as hell wasn’t going to ditch her at her dealer’s place, even if I did know where it was and I didn’t. I guess I had no choice but to take her back to my two buzzkills.

This chick was a mess. She needed a keeper. How many times had Byers and Frohike said the same thing about me? But I wasn’t half as fucked up as Eugenia. I was the opposite kind of fucked up as Eugenia, maybe that was the key to the mystery. I didn’t know how to live in my own skin either, but instead of injecting heroin between my toes, which I figured out was where she shot-up, I zoned out and pretended I was nothing but code on a screen. Not too different really, just another way of avoiding other people.

I put her purse around my neck and threw Eugenia over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

Who should be in the hotel when I opened the door but Skinner. Skinner with a mass of papers in front of him and a worried looking Byers and Fro’.  
I wanted to tell them all “this isn’t what it looks like” but I didn’t know what it looked like, not for sure.

“Where the hell have you been?” Skinner said.

“What the hell, Kid?” Fro’ said, which was unfair since I am like not that much younger than Byers. And yet I consistently got the”kid” treatment and he didn’t. Just one of many unfair things in my life.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Byers asked.

“Move this shit over, will you, Skinner, girl’s gettin’ heavy,” I said kicking the side of my bed where he’d spread his papers.

“Put her on the other bed, then,” Skinner said.

“That’s my bed,” Byers said, his usual prissy self.

“The two of you can trade beds, Byers, Langly can have the one with the girl in it,” Skinner said, kinda smartass.

“What’re you waiting for?” Frohike said.

“For one of you yutzes to pull down the blanket, it’s like you got no idea how to treat a lady,” I said, which mighta been dumb but it was how I felt. It’s kinda silly what a big kick I got out of laying her in the bed, especially the moment when I was coming up from laying her down and it was sorta like I had been ontop of her. And it was weird I mean, I normally had those kinds of thoughts about chicks whenever I was near them, but I had been driving around Oklahoma City worried about Eugenia trying to figure out what to do and I never once thought about her having certain anatomy, anatomy that theoretically fit a certain way with certain parts of my anatomy.

Then I laid her down in the bed and didn’t even think about it until I was letting her go. It was like since I asked her the question. The question. She’d gone from a chick, all mysterious and shit, to a person in my head. 

A person who had been fucked over and needed my help. I wondered what kind of help I could give her that didn’t have a picture of a president on it. I mean knew realistically, being male meant a lot of things were easier for me. At least that was the speech Scully liked to give us all after too many beers. I liked Mulder’s speech about the possibility of Elvis being an alien better; it was more entertaining and as a bonus it didn’t make me feel like shit.  
I wondered if it might be possible for me to use things being easier for me, to make things easier for Eugenia. That’s what we did as the Gunmen, help people. I couldn’t fix the whole history of men and women for everyone in the world, not in one lifetime, but maybe I could do something, some how, for Eugenia. 

“As I was saying, Gentlemen,” Skinner said clearing his throat “It’s going to be impossible to hide the three of you in the same place. You’re too conspicuous.”

Split up the Lone Gunmen? Sounded like a government conspiracy, to me. I mean, Byers and Frohike might be pains in the ass but they were also my best friends. The three of us were a unit.

“Sounds like a bunch of shit to me” Fro’ said.

“I knew you wouldn’t like it, but I can’t see any way around it, you’re simply not safe together,” Skinner said.

 

”What are our new identities?” Byers asked. 

 

“Melvin,” Skinner said picking up one folder “You’re teaching auto mechanics at a technical school in Portland. Regular vacations, a pension, and summers off. So don’t bitch. Name’s Warren Hertzog.”

“So basically a lateral move from Melvin Frohike,” Fro’ said looking over the papers.

“Adam Overly, archivist at the Ann Arbor PBS affiliate,” Skinner said pulling the fan of papers in front of him into a neat stack and handing them to Byers.

“I like PBS,” Byers said non-committally.

“Langly, you’re staying in Oklahoma City,” Skinner said “teaching remedial math classes at Oklahoma City University under the name Richard Black. And you’re getting a haircut.”

“Great, remedial math, cows, and a fucking haircut? Why not just fucking shoot me? It’d be less painful,” I asked, but in the back of my head a little crawl was reading – this might not be so bad-. It wasn’t even a fully formed idea but something like a seed growing in the back of my head.

“Don’t tempt me, Langly. Besides, word is you finish your dissertation and pick up that Russian class you’re missing and you can have some better classes if that means anything when it comes to math. And guys, I realize, there’s no way I can stop you, realistically, from keeping in contact with each other online, just please…for me…don’t get caught,” Skinner said.

I looked at Byers and he looked like a kid at Christmas.  
I looked at Fro’ but he was looking hard at Eugenia. I turned my back before he could see my face.

“I guess I can give it a shot,” I said.


	2. Why We Do the Things We Do

Byers and Fro’ were both gone to start their new lives before the sun came up.

Genie was still asleep at check out time so I drove her car to the address Skinner gave me. The neighborhood was mostly Viet Namese, with Banh Mi and Pho joints on every corner, the house itself non-descript for the neighborhood, probably built in the 20s, two beds, two baths, not nearly enough outlets. It was furnished in a half ass sort of a way; meaning two beds, a couch, two living room chairs, a dining table. No computers, no desks, no book shelves, only one lock on the front door and one on the back. I carried Genie in and put her on one of the beds.

Maybe I had been distracted earlier because I got that feeling again as I was laying her down. That feeling that made me sick to my stomach and my dick as hard as a fucking rock. It was getting to be a, you know, a habit, picturing Genie underneath me, which made me feel like an asshole. Yeah, me and every other guy who saw her probably pictured themselves fucking Genie. 

I needed to get that out of my head because it was never going to happen. Not in this lifetime. Average looking chicks wouldn’t give me the time of day. Girls like Genie weren’t even living in the same dimension as me.

“Wake up,” I said shaking her shoulders “Eugenia, Wake up.”

“Where am I?” She said, and her breath was god awful. I stepped back to the doorway. Even hanging out in a room with a girl on the bed was thin ice. 

“You remember anything from last night?” I asked.

Genie squinted at me and I was kinda surprised her make up wasn’t more fucked up than it was.

“You’re a virgin,” she said and I instantly regretted telling her but it seemed like the obvious thing to say at the time if I wanted her to know I wasn’t gonna rape her while she was passed out.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Your name’s Richard…Long or something like that,” she said thinking.

“Something like that,” I said “Is that all you got?”

“This sounds crazy but I remember you saying something about being in Witness Protection,” she said like I was gonna laugh at her.

I nodded “It’s Richard Black now, I guess.”

“Where am I?” she asked. It was a fair question.

“I tried to take you home last night but the address on your shit was your exe’s and he didn’t know where your umm…boyfriend lives,” I said watching her.

“You took me to Jimmy’s? Shit,” she said.

“You know, if you got clean he’d probably let you see your kids,” I said, mostly because I knew what it was like to miss your mom, even if she wasn’t mother of the year.

Genie breathed out like I suggested she build a full size replica of the Taj Mahal out of matchsticks. 

“You got fired, too, but you weren’t real conscious at the time,” I said.

“I nodded out again?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said and watched as she sunk lower on the bed.

“Did Jimmy say anything about my child support?” she asked looking more and more deflated.

“I paid part of it last night,” I said.

“Why?” she asked.

“’Cause your kids need school clothes and I had it on me,” I said because it was the truth “I can give him the rest tomorrow.”

“Why would you do that?” she asked.

“Well,” I said, I hadn’t asked myself the question and thinking about it made me kinda nervous “It ain’t like you’re gonna be less broke tomorrow and the kids gotta have clothes.”

Genie looked at me warily “How am I ‘sposed to pay you back?”

I couldn’t help it, I laughed “I ain’t that kinda guy. I’m just tryin’ t’ be a good Samaritan. ‘Sides you’re like, the only person I know in like a thousand mile radius.”

Eugenia looked around the room.

“It’s not the Ritz or anything but you’re welcome to stay here, if you wanna,” I said “It’d be pretty hard t’ clean up livin’ with your supplier.”

“What’s the rent like?” she asked.

“Nothin’,” I said “This dump was bought and paid for courtesy of the American tax paying public.”

“And it’s yours?” she asked. Genie looked out the blinds behind her “That your car?” she asked.

I shrugged. It was a three year old Toyota and a 2 bed, 2 bath, in a definitely lower class neighborhood but I guess it beat being homeless with a 13 year old lemon.

“What did you do?” she asked. 

 

That was a tough one, I took a breath “A bunch of different stuff but I’m ‘posed to start teachin’ math to chimps at OCU next week.”

“That’s not what I meant, I meant like, what did you do to wind up in witness protection? But wait a minute. You’re a college professor?” she said looking me up and down.

“I’m a hacker, a damn good one, and I uncovered a bunch of shit on a government defense contractor,” I said. I figured that was a safe way to explain it. It was only sort of a lie.

“So you’re not a professor,” she said like she was trying to figure me out. Really I think she was putting too much thought into it. I’m pretty fucking simple.

“I gotta finish my dissertation on Mandelbrot sets,” I said “And pass Russian. Fuckin’ Russian. Fuckin’ impossible fuckin’ language if you ask me. So like in May, I guess I’ll have my alphabet soup.”

Eugenia blinked twice with her big brown eyes “What the fuck did you just say?” 

 

I stopped and thought about how to explain it “I don’t have my Ph.d yet. I have to pass Russian which I suck at and I have to present a paper about, um, I guess you’d call it, umm repeating mathematical patterns and uhh defend it to a bunch of math assholes. I also kinda think there might be some intersection between repeating patterns in nature and Riemann’s hypothesis and some work Grothendiek did in the late 50’s . The first paper’s more or less done. I been workin’ on it off an’ on since ’88. I just gotta mess with it a little more, clean it up some. I’m probably ten, fifteen years away from showin’ anybody the deal with the Riemann Hypothesis. When I get that first paper done I can teach real classes, I mean, not remedial. That’s what the guys at the FBI say.”

Eugenia didn’t say anything, she just sat there, looking at me, like I was from outer space.

“I used to code for games for you know, extra cash, but I’m too uhh well known in those circles to do that anymore, since I’m ‘sposed to be like dead,” I said.

“So you’re like a computer guy?” she asked.

“I’m like a computer god,” I said.   
~~  
I gave Genie’s ex the rest of her child support the next day.  
In the light of day he looked like the Native American Beefcake to beat all beefcakes.  
Like he posed for the covers of romance novels and greeting cards when he wasn’t busy being dad of the year.  
The worst part was he was a nice guy.  
Me and Genie were a pretty good fit, you know, roommate wise. She loved horror movies, usually the dumber the better, and she was always willing to give science fiction a try. Like the only thing she wouldn’t watch was romantic shit, which was surprising from a chick, but it just seemed to piss her off. Even like LOTR, I mean I wanted to see Return of the King in a theatre, preferably IMAX and since Genie hadn’t seen the first two we watched ‘em at the house. Her only complaint was the Arwen-Aragorn thing. When I told her that had been tacked on for commercial appeal, we kinda had fun bitching about it.  
And there was a lot of overlap in our musical tastes, more than I ever had with Fro’ or Byers, for sure. The girl loved Motorhead, although she couldn’t take the Dead Kennedys- she said Jello Biafra’s voice gave her a headache. But she liked anything loud with a lot a bass. When she was in a mood she’d blast old Joan Jett.  
There were a few issues.  
Mostly mine.  
The trouble was Genie’s toes. Her whole feet to tell the truth.  
The house had carpet every place but the kitchen and the bathroom and Genie liked to run around barefoot. Worse than that it seemed like every other day she was re-painting her toe nails something sexy; cherry red, or black, or purple.  
It seemed fair to yell at her not to run around the house in a t-shirt and panties, or jeans and a push-up bra. I mean, I knew she was messing with me, ‘cause she could. And it just took a couple of days for her to get the picture about running around half naked. I mean, I wanted to look at her that way when she was a stranger I was never going to see again. To tell the truth I just couldn’t take Genie’s bare legs or Genie in her bra. No way I could talk to her like that.  
Still I knew it was overboard to freak out over her painting her toenails in the living room. She had the prettiest little feet, they looked perfectly soft and tiny with high arches and tiny little perfect toes. It was weird of me, I knew it was, but I couldn’t look at them naked like that in the same room with me, without wanting to touch them, see if they were as soft as they looked. There was something, I dunno, intimate about sitting on the couch with a chick, watching tv, while she painted her toenails.  
It felt intimate to me.  
I knew a few chicks in my life before Genie, but I never saw Yves or Agent Scully barefoot, much less called Alex Trebek a smug dickweed while they decided between poison apple and black heart polish.  
The one thing I can say for sure was I was pretty fuckin’ grateful for the throw pillows on the couch. It became a regular part of the evening’s activities for me to hold one on my lap while I pictured Frohike in the shower, ignoring Genie as much as I could.  
I felt like the biggest creep ever. I mean I also kinda wanted to, it’s embarrassing but I thought about kissing them, tickling them, and most of all rubbing my cock on them. I don’t know how many mornings I stood in the shower with my dick in my hand picturing myself coming all over Genie’s bare feet.

At least I knew it was my problem, not hers.  
~~  
In one way it was like living with, I dunno, Mulder, I guess. Girl was into woowoo in a big way.   
She checked her horoscope every morning.  
Not in the paper, though, she had books and charts and compasses and shit she pulled out of the trunk of her car along with a tackle box full of make-up and all her stripper gear.  
She also carried tarot cards in her purse and shuffled them whenever she was nervous. Every morning, and I mean every morning, as soon as she was dressed she would do like a ...card thingy...a spread on the coffee table while she drank her coffee.  
When I told her about the time me and Fro’ spent six months experimenting with Kirlian photography Genie got pissed off, though. She thought I was messin’ with her.  
She was kinda touchy.  
~~  
First thing Genie did was start looking for a job.  
I was searching through the phone book working up the nerve to get my hair chopped off when she came home all pissed off… again.  
“No luck?” I asked “Lemme guess, does a bear shit in the woods?”  
“Is the Pope Catholic?” she answered dropping her purse and flopping down on the couch.  
“Does the Pope shit in the woods?” I asked forgetting about my impending doom for a minute.  
“Maybe if the Pope-mobile breaks down a long way from home,” she said.  
“What kinda job are you looking for, anyway?” I asked.  
“The kind where they pay you money,” she said, like I was stupid.  
“I mean, like, doing what?” I said, thinking I could help out.  
“Seriously, dude, I have a reputation, nobody’ll hire me to strip in this town anymore. So I’ve gotta take what I can get,” she said sliding off her stupid tall sexy sexy shoes.  
I couldn’t say why but her tiny little feet with the painted toenails were even more deadly when she was wearing stockings so I looked back at the phone book and tried to think of something gross.  
“But like, what do you wanna do? Maybe I can help you find somethin’,” I said still staring at the phonebook.  
“I’m pretty sure there isn’t anything I can do at a college,” she said with this kind of worried expression.  
It was fucking weird the way Genie assumed she was dumb and couldn’t do certain kinds of things just because she’d never tried them. I ain’t exactly John Wayne but I spent my whole career at The Lone Gunmen doing crazy shit I’d never tried before. Frohike was pretty much the smartest guy I knew and he didn’t have any more formal education than Genie. Why did she think she was dumb?  
“Come off it,” I said.  
“I didn’t even graduate from high school,” Genie said “I’m not qualified to do anything but wait tables and I’m a terrible fucking waitress.”  
I jumped up and went to the nearest monitor “I can fix that, easy,” I said “Come watch the master at work. Where’d you go to high school?”  
“Fucking Podunk Elgin, Oklahoma,” Genie said looking confused.  
It took less than three minutes.  
“There you go, you’re now a high school graduate same as if you stood around in that cheesy nylon cap and gown sweating with everybody else.” I cracked my knuckles preparing to set Genie up but good “So what do you want to do? Say the word and I’ll work my magic.”  
Genie looked at me like I was completely nuts “What if I said make me like a brain surgeon or an airline pilot? Could you do that?”  
“Sure I could, I mean, I’d probably ask you if you knew how to like fly a plane, for, like, ethical reasons, but you’re talking to the guy who hacked the Pentagon, the JPL, and the Queens Bank of Georgetown, Cayman Islands, all inside 17 minutes, my kung fu’s the best. Of course I can do it, I can do fucking anything I want, pretty much,” I admitted.  
“You don’t get it, do you? I don’t know how to do anything,” Genie said picking up her shoes and her purse.  
“I don’t even get why you want a job. Jobs suck,” I said.  
She stared at me like I was stupid for a minute.   
“I don’t want a job, I need a job,” she said  
“Then why not tell me what you wanna do so I can help you find something you don’t completely hate?” I said. She had a head like a rock, that chick.  
Genie stood there with her shoes in one hand and her purse in the other for about three beats before she finally answered “You wanna know what I really want? I wanna win the lottery and never have to work again.”  
“You, me, and everybody else. Get in line,” I said then a thought hit me as I watched her put her purse on her shoulder and pick the books I’d read that day off the coffee table and put them on the right shelves. I mean, I figured they were the right shelves. She was the one who organized my books after I sort of anonymously bought them off our old landlord in Takoma Park and had them shipped to OKC. She sorted them by genre, then topic, then alphabetically by author. The comics were in my room organized by publisher, universe, then primary character, then chronological order “You ever thought about being a librarian, Genie?”  
“You’re high. You’ve been smokin’ crack while I was out of the house,” she said.  
“Yeah, no question you’ll need to change your wardrobe but I think you could do it,” I said. The more I thought about it the better I liked it. Genie was like a born librarian.  
I turned back to my monitor.  
In seven minutes Genie had a degree in library science.  
Not that it mattered. She refused to use it.  
By the end of the week she had a job at Hooters.  
Seeing her in the uniform kinda freaked me out but it didn’t matter.   
She only lasted 3 days.  
~~  
I was a little weirded out when on my way out the door headed for my first day of class Genie threw her arms around my neck and gave me a little peck on the cheek.

I wasn’t used to being touched by another person, much less kissed. Even if it was, you know, on the cheek.

I mean, my mom cut out when I was in kindergarten and my dad was like, the least touchy-feelly guy on the planet. I think he hugged me, like twice in my life. And then, you know, after I went East to school I never got touched at all. From time to time when something really shitty happened Hickey would put his hand on my back. Mulder’s a hugger. The guy musta hugged me a dozen different times over the years. One time Agent Scully kissed me on the cheek. That’s about the extent of the physical contact I had in my life before Genie. I could probably name each individual incident if I thought about it. 

That was the thing about Genie, it wasn’t a one time thing, after morning that she gave me a hug and a kiss on the cheek every morning when I went to work. Probably the same way she did for her kids before she got too fucked up to have contact. I wondered if I ought to try to get her and Jimmy back together. 

She gave me a hug me when I got home,too.  
Friendly, not sexy. If I got turned on that was on me.

 

~~  
The first thing I did was start setting up my hardware and building myself a little network for the house.

I was able to access most of my old files and get, not only the metric fuck-ton of disorganized work I’d done on my Mandelbrot set theory over the years, but a fair amount of random dicking around I’d done on chaos theory, too. The two had more in common than you might think. It was weird, though, hacking yourself.   
I’d done way more work than I realized. The hardest part was gonna be paring it down to a length a committee would read.

I didn’t mean to but I got sucked in right away, removing repetition, rereading and revising.

Genie came into my room with a laundry basket in her arms.

“Did you know you have a washer and dryer?” she said.

At least that was what I guessed she said, after the fact. Truth was I saw her, and then I realized she was talking. Imaginary Byers slapped me on the back of my head. Imaginary Frohike called me a dumbass.

“I wanna show you something cool, watch this,” she said and walked to the socks laying on the floor “wooooooooo,” she said picking up my socks and pretending they were flying to the hamper “three whole feet.”

Fuck that. I was busy working on something interesting.

“Screw you,” I said.

“In your dreams, dumbass,” she said and it was nice ‘cause she reminded me of both Byers and Fro’ at the same time.

“Yeah, the ones I have after I’ve been to that all-you-can-eat Mexican place,” I said “If I wake up screaming now you know why.”

“So like pho tonight?” she said.

I thought about it “nahhh, not in the mood, what about somethin’ different?”

“Like what?” Genie asked.

“I dunno, we could just drive around until we find something that looks good,” I said.

“Fine by me, but you gotta quit dicking around on the computer and write that quiz for your class,” she said.

“Fuck, I forgot about that,” I said, I’d rather work on my dissertation...fuck I’d rather trim Frohike’s toenails if it came to that, “Why can’t you do it for me?”

“Because if I wrote the quiz it’d be like 2+2 and they’d all pass and you’d fuckin’ hate that,” she said.

“Yeah, I would,” I admitted.

~~  
Teaching sucked.   
For one thing it was like hanging out with Jimmy Bond all day multiplied by...I dunno, however many chimps I had in class.  
For another I had to give all my little dumbasses assignments, which meant I had to grade said assignments. And ditto for tests.  
Fuck me if I could keep track of any of it.

Luckily Eugenia was the only fucking human being on planet Earth more anally retentive than John Byers.

“Euglena,” I yelled across the house “You seen my Monday-Wednesday chapter one quizes, I told those chuckle-fucks I’d hand ‘em back today?” 

I didn’t hear an answer, so I yelled louder “Euglena.” It fit. Euglenas were tiny, cute, plus they had a whip.

“Euglena!” I shouted. 

I walked to the door to her room. The door was open and she wasn’t there. I looked outside, her piece of shit car was in the drive.

Maybe she was in the bathroom. I had to let her have the bedroom with it’s own bathroom because she literally spent three hours in the bathroom every morning getting ready. Sure, she smelled great and looked better than human beings were supposed to look in 3D, but she still took fucking forever. She was always out before I had to leave for class, though. 

I knocked on the bathroom door “Genie? You okay?”

 

I heard…somethin’ kinda indistinct but she was definitely in there.

“If you’re okay you better fucking say somethin’ now or I’m comin’ in,” I said.

She said nothin’. There weren’t even crickets.

I got my multi-tool out of my pocket and opened the door. Genie was on the floor in her t-shirt and panties, needle hanging out of her arm this time. There was a pregnancy test on the counter.

Positive.

Fuck. I’d have given her the money for an abortion she didn’t have to go and do somethin’ stupid.

Fuck.

I calculated the time to call 911 vs. the time to just throw her dumb ass in my car and get to the nearest E.R. which was what I did.

The first thing she said to me, while all the medical people were still working on her was “I put your papers on the kitchen table, you probably laid your briefcase ontop of them.”

So, Genie went to detox for ten days, but she wouldn’t go to treatment. I was kinda relieved. It was lame around the house without her.

~~  
Two days after she checked into detox I went to see Jimmy Yellow Bear.  
He answered the door with two little girls dancing around him, both of them carbon copies of Eugenia.Well, one was dancing, the other was scowling with her arms folded across her chest. They were older than I expected, not that I could tell how old they were by looking but still, they were older than I expected. I thought back to when I hacked Genie’s medical records, 8 and 11, born when Genie was 16 and 19. Was that what 11 year olds looked like?

“Um Hi, Jimmy?” I said wanting to keep everything friendly.

Of course the phone rang while I was standing there.

“Hang on,” Jimmy said holding up one finger and ran off to answer the phone. Didn’t invite me in, went without saying.

The big one, bigger anyway, Eugenia’s bigger kid, stood there holding the door open just wide enough for her face. 

“You’re my mom’s new boyfriend,” she said it like it was a fact.

“No, I’m not,” I said.

“Dad said mom’s new boyfriend was a skinny white guy,” she said.

I shrugged “Me and your mom are just friends.” 

“But she’s living with you, right?” the girl said, looking at me like I was some kind of asshole who wouldn’t cop to getting into Genie’s pants.   
Yeah, right. Strung out or not, if I was getting laid by a chick as hot as Genie I’d be taking out ads in the paper.

“She’s got her own room,” I said.

“Maybe you snore. You look like you snore. My dad said you were a rich college professor,” she said.

“Not rich by a long shot,” I said.

The kid gave me a look like she was about to ask for a financial statement “Are you a college professor?”

“I teach at a college,” I said not too interested in arguing academia with a grade school kid.

“You’re her boyfriend,” she told me “Tell dad to hurry up,” she ordered her little sister.

“Tell him yourself,” the little one said.

“Fine, I will, then,” the big one said.

“Good, go on, then,” the little one said.

Then the little one took the big one’s place holding the door just wide enough for her head.

“I’m eight,” she said.

“Good for you,” I said, what the hell are you supposed to say to something like that? 

“How old are you?” the little one asked.

“thirty-three,” I said.

“That’s a year older than my dad. My dad’s 32. He’s on the phone with work right now. I think they’re trying to get him to come in but he already worked today while we were at school. My dad doesn’t work on school nights. You know what my dad’s job is? You wanna guess?” the kid went on about a mile a minute. She musta got that from Genie.

“No clue,” I said.

“My dad shakes his thing for white ladies,” she said and laughed like it was the silliest thing ever “Paris says for all kinds of ladies but the drunk white ladies tip the best.” And then she laughed some more.

I didn’t really have a good reply for that. I was too busy being stuck on the fact that the big kid was named Paris. I guess it made sense, though, that two strippers would skip the preliminaries and give their kids stripper names straight off the bat but thinking back I hadn’t really paid any attention to the names on the kids birth certificates besides Genie’s. 

“What’s your name?” the kid asked “My name’s Stormy.”  
Great, another stripper name.

“Richard,” I said just as Jimmy came back.

He gave me a big fake-ass smile and turned to the kids “I’m going to need to have a grown-up talk with Mom’s friend.”

Inside the house I heard Paris smarting off. I couldn’t quite catch the words but I sure as hell knew that tone. I heard it from her mom often enough.

Jimmy shut the door behind him and folded his arms across his chest “Make it quick, what do you want? I’ve gotta get supper started.”

“Genie’s tryin’ to get her life straightened out,” I said.

“I hope she does,” Jimmy said.

“She’s clean and I know she’d like to get to see her kids,” I said.

“Most guys prefer it when a girl doesn’t have a lot of baggage so why do you care if she sees her kids?” Jimmy asked.

“It ain’t like that. Me and Genie, we’re just friends,” I said even though Jimmy looked about as skeptical as his kids “I know what it’s like to have your mom cut out on you and wish you could see her.”

Jimmy looked at me hard and then he tilted his head, just a little “If she can stay clean thirty days I’ll give her a shot. She can come for a visit. A supervised visit, okay? But thirty days clean comes first.”

“Thanks man,” I said shaking his hand.   
~~  
~~  
“I hear you put my best friend in detox,” a voice said while I dug through my filing cabinet. I couldn’t find a fucking thing in that abyss from hell and I was desperately trying to finish my grading and paperwork before the rocket scientists I generously referred to as “students” came in wanting help, or slack, or some other shit when what they really needed was a brain transplant.

I might have jumped a little but I eventually turned around. It was a guy, native like Genie and Jimmy, wearing glasses and a bright pink t-shirt printed with the words GAILY OKLAHOMAN . 

“If Genie’s your best friend it looks to me like you dropped the ball,” I said because , fuck, when I met Genie she had nothin’ and nobody or she wouldn’t have wound up in my spare bedroom.

The guy gave me a hard look “I’ve put her ass in treatment, twice. I couldn’t stand to keep watching her tryin’ to kill herself anymore.” 

“Genie ain’t gonna kill herself. I ain’t gonna let her,” I said pushing my glasses up.

The guy sat himself down in my extra chair and I wished for a second I hadn’t moved that pile of papers onto my desk.

“You have no idea who I am, do you?” he said crossing his legs and running one hand through his long hair. I was jealous for a minute. I missed my real hair at the weirdest times.

“Care to introduce yourself?” I asked.

“Certainly, Dr. Black,” the guy said “I’m Bryan Watchymamsookwat. I’m Genie’s babydaddy.”

I wondered for a minute whether I should correct him about the Dr. thing or not.

So he was Paris’s Dad. She must have been the one who told him. I’d known the kid was born when Genie was in high school but...huh...it was discouraging to know even gay guys were luckier with chicks than I was.

Still it made a kind of sense, I mean, if anyone was gonna convince a gay guy to give chicks a try it would be a chick as hot as Genie. Likewise I guess someone not interested in chicks would seem like a challenge.

Me? I was about as much of a challenge as a dog with a FREE TO GOOD HOME sign around his neck.

“That’s real friendly knockin’ up a chick in high school, makin’ sure she can’t even graduate,” I said.

“That was her, not me,” Bryan said leaning my way “She had some harebrained idea a baby would solve all our problems.The school slut and the school fag. Like the jock’s would stop calling me faggot in the hall if I got her pregnant.”

I wanted to argue with him but that did sound like Genie.

“I just came here to tell you, let you know, you can tell Genie for me” here he paused and kinda sighed “I can’t take being around her if she’s not clean, I can’t watch that, but if she is...well she’s my best friend either way and I miss her. Let her know that, will you?” he said “And uh...thanks.” 

I nodded. And I was as good as my word.  
It kinda hurt my feelings when Genie asked if it was okay with Bryan if she called him.

~~  
About a week after Genie got out of detox I got her her abortion. I don’t know what I was expecting but there was a crowd with picket signs on the sidewalk in front of the clinic.

“Shit,” Genie said.

“It’s cool, it’s gonna be cool. I’ll go with you. I ain’t gonna make you do this shit by yourself,” I said, because I wasn’t.

“They’re gonna think it’s yours,” she said. 

“So what?” I said. Why would I mind? I mean if I was her I wouldn’t like people thinking I got knocked up by a loser like me, but people thinkin’ I was with Genie was no kinda insult as far as I was concerned.

Like I said I don’t know what I was expecting, but I was kinda surprised when the assholes with the signs got right up in my face. I didn’t go around touching Genie as a matter of course, but the minute they shoved their fucking signs in her face I wrapped my arm around her and started shouting right back.

“Kill baby baby baby kill kill kill,” I shouted back “If you idiots want to stop abortions put your money into free and reliable birth control, ya freakin’ morons.”

Genie looked up at me like I grew a second head.

~~ 

We were riding home afterwards. I kind expected her to...I dunno, cry or want to talk about her feelings or...something. Through detox and the E.R. and now this she hadn’t been anything but stiff and pissed off. Like, Frohike talked about his feelings more than Euglena did. I always heard chicks were supposed to be more, you know, emotional, but when I thought about it I wasn’t so sure that was true. I mean, Scully, Yves, Genie ; they were all way tougher than any of the guys I knew. Huh, I wondered why I never thought of that before.

Still, considering everything I knew about her it didn’t seem healthy. Six months earlier I never would have noticed, but she was the only friend I had in the world at the moment. The only person I could have a conversation worth having with. I had a lot of time to think about Genie, and what she was doing, what she needed.

“Like, if you ever need to talk about shit, you can talk to me,” I said “You don’t have to but you can, if you wanna.”

“What shit?” Genie asked, like she had nothin’ to talk about and I was talkin’ nonsense.

“This, maybe,” I said letting go of the steering wheel for a second then remembering myself “or...um...why you shoot dope, what happened to you when you were a kid, what it was like havin’ a kid in high school. Take your pick.”

“What for? It’s not gonna change anything,” she said her little hands curled to fists in her lap.

“It might,” I groped for an explanation, wishing all of a sudden that I had Byers there to help me out “You know... help you get it all straightened out, like, in your own head. Make sure you blame the right person and all that.”

“I know exactly what happened and I know who’s to blame,” Genie said and something in her voice scared me, like accidentally waking up a snake “You want to know exactly what happened to me when I was a kid? It wasn’t like the ABC after school specials. He didn’t buy me presents and make me promise I wouldn’t tell anyone about our special secret. No, what happened was, my mom’s husband got so turned on when he pulled down my panties and gave me a spanking that he stuck his dick in me afterwards. And after that that’s what he did every time I got in trouble until I told my mom. And then guess what happened; my mom said I led him on and I was a terrible daughter and I never wanted her to be happy, I wanted her to die alone and I was trying to ruin her life. I got raped in order to ruin her life. And that is what happened to me when I was a kid and knowing it was not my fault does not make it any less shitty.”

I knew I was ‘sposed to say somethin’ at that point but I had no idea what. I also felt like I might throw up. At the paper we uncovered truly heinous shit, spying, polluting, whole sale lies and murder, enormous cover-ups but none of it was personal. This was, I don’t know what you’d call it except intimate violence, so close up there was no escape. I wanted to hold Genie in my arms right then, tell her it was gonna be okay. But I also knew, so far, her life hadn’t been okay, and I’d seem like just another liar. Besides she probably wouldn’t appreciate one more dude trying to cop a feel under false pretenses. Was it false pretenses? I couldn’t tell. 

“Got nothin’ to say about that, huh? You try to act like you’re all badass and shit but you’re like some big over grown boy scout. Remember ‘Happy Days’? It’s like I’m living with Richie Cunningham from ‘Happy Days’,” she said pulling on the hem of her shirt.

I think she was pissed off about the Euglena thing ‘cause I found about 6 searches for Euglena on the computer, five of them spelled wrong, but she never called me anything but ‘Richie’ after that.

~~  
As soon as she got home she started cleaning. Not like just the dishes in the sink either, like the floor on her knees, with a scrub brush.

I hated it on a coupla different levels. One; that she thought I was such a pig that she had to disinfect everything I touched. Two; her ass bounced when she scrubbed in this way that drove me crazy. Of course she was barefoot and I could see the soles of her feet; that made three levels of crazy.

It felt like, I dunno, sexual napalm. I took cold showers but the feeling wouldn’t wash away.  
Finally I couldn’t take it any more, I went to the kitchen where she had pulled out the stove and was scrubbing the wall behind the damn thing.

“Jesus, Genie, would you cut that shit out! Sit your ass down. Watch a damn movie or somethin’ for fuck’s sake,” I said, okay maybe I yelled it.

“Either let me clean or give me some money for dope, one or the other, Richie,” Genie said. She had big rubber gloves up to her elbows like the mom on Dexter’s Lab and a scrub brush in her hand.

When she put it like that I didn’t have a whole lot of options.

“Okay,” I said because I couldn’t very well tell her to go shoot up, could I? “Wanna walk down to the corner later and get some ice cream?”

The place on the corner made French bread, ice cream, and these spicy Viet Namese sandwiches that were cheap as fuck and totally kicked ass.

“Once the kitchen’s clean and I look half-way decent,” Genie said.

You could have built fucking circuit boards on the kitchen floor and Genie looked so hot she could have been a pin-up for guys with a cleaning fetish, but I didn’t argue.

Instead I did what I had to do, I went to my room and jerked off.  
When I came out she had her cards spread on the kitchen table but she put them away like she was embarrassed.

Later we had ice cream. 

~~  
It was a matter of days before she started making noises about finding another job.  
Too bad I was having my own problems.  
As long as Genie was at home she kept my shit on an even keel around the house but my office was a fucking wreck. I was in deep shit over missing paperwork. I didn’t get home until after dark and I still couldn’t find jack.  
Genie was sitting on the porch smoking a cigarette. She didn’t smoke in the house. It wasn’t on account of my asthma, though. She didn’t think it was “clean”.  
“Where the fuck have you been?” she asked the minute I got out of the car “Let me guess, not a good day?”  
“Does a bear shit in the Vatican?” I said running my hands through my stupid short hair, even though Genie said it looked better that way.  
“A bear shits where ever it damn well pleases,” Genie said putting out her cigarette out.  
“I think I’m gonna get fired,” I said.  
“How come? I thought you were good at math,” she said.  
“But I suck at paperwork,” I admitted “And I can’t find jack or shit in my office.”  
“At least you have a job,” she said.  
“Not for very much longer, if it keeps going like this. I had to go see the dean today,” I said “Like the head of the school. It was like being sent to the principal’s office,” I said, it sounds totally lame but I was one good shove from a total meltdown.  
Eugenia lit another cigarette and I noticed she was barefoot and there was a bottle of polish next to her on the porch. I knew I was pretty fucked up that the sight of it didn’t send me into a tailspin.  
“You think maybe tomorrow you could go into work with me and help me straighten it out?” I said feeling desperate.  
“I was gonna go put out some more applications,” she said.  
“What do you want a job for, Genie? Why don’t we… you know, you help me out, I help you out? Keeping my ass straight is a full time job at the bare minimum,” I said trying not to beg.  
“You already help me out,” she said taking a drag “I was trying to, you know, get my shit together... stand on my own two feet, all that crap.”  
“Fuck,” I said running my hands through my short stupid hair again “If you can manage that you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din, ‘cause I will be totally fucked if you leave me with my dick out in the wind on this one.”  
“Okay, I’ll help you out, but you’re not my boss, you’re like, my patient or some shit,” Genie said finishing her cigarette.  
“Fine, whatever, just save my ass,” I said.  
“First thing in the morning, Richie,” she said.  
I wasn’t sure whether I was relieved or let down she wore jeans and a t-shirt to put my work shit in order. That man-woman power thing was still hanging over both our heads and it felt to me like it shifted minute by minute, like a teeter totter.  
~~  
Life was different everyday. Different from how it had ever been for me.  
I was working hard on my dissertation and teaching morons who could barely get a pencil between their toes. I kept, like making them cry, and not just the girls, either. And not on purpose. It made me a little crazy. I mean, if you’re gonna be that lame you gotta expect some criticism, right? I had to go like, painfully slow for any of them to get it. It was tedious. And nerve racking, too.  
Bryan came over probably once a week, he was an okay guy.   
After a while Jimmy started to let Genie back in the girl’s lives. She went to open houses and parent teacher meetings, had dinner with the fam once a week.  
The rest of the week she and I had a good time together. We went out any time there was a decent band in town. Watched Jeopardy and ate take-out. Every once in a while Genie cooked but her reptoire was limited.  
She kept me from forgetting test days or losing papers. In exchange I paid for her child support and beauty products, which were not cheap. It was a good thing I didn’t have to worry about rent.  
Most importantly Genie made sure I got my paperwork handed in on time.  
It was cool.   
We were cool together. Like Friends. Buddies. Maybe something more than that but not something I knew how to explain or quantify.


	3. Even the Losers Get Lucky Sometimes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> no one can screw things up forever.

~~  
I went to see Jimmy at work one day during my lunch hour.  
It seemed like the right thing to do.  
Stormy hadn’t been kidding, the place was full up with loud, crazy, drunk women. Not pleasantly buzzed, flat out drunk.  
Wanna know how drunk? So drunk I got my ass grabbed twice on my way to the dressing room. So blind drunk.  
“Hey!” Jimmy said drinking water from a bottle.   
“Hey,” I said wondering what the hell I’d been thinking coming to a place like this.  
“Somethin’ wrong?” Jimmy asked “Genie okay?”  
“Genie’s cool, man, nothin’s wrong,” I said.  
“So? Why are you here?” Jimmy asked, it was a reasonable question, I guess.  
“I wanted to talk to you about maybe getting’ back together,” I said feeling dumber by the minute.  
“With Genie?” Jimmy asked.  
“Nah, man, with me, genius,” I said.  
“That’s about as likely as me getting’ back with Genie,” Jimmy said shakin’ his head.  
“How come? I mean, she’s tryin’ real hard and say what you want the girl’s smokin’ hot,” I said “The kids would love it.”  
Jimmy shook his head “No way, man, no fuckin’ way. I mean we’re friends, me and Genie. We’ll always be friends but I’d just as soon stick my dick in a pencil sharpener as that crazy bitch.”  
I looked at him. I couldn’t imagine feelin’ that way about Genie. I didn’t know what to say.  
“If sleepin’ with Genie’s such a great idea why don’t you give it a shot?” Jimmy staring hard in the mirror at the side of his face. Then I realized he was putting in his contacts.  
I shook my head. As if that was even an option.  
~~  
I asked Genie that night during dinner.  
“You ever think about getting back with Jimmy?” I asked. We were having cheap Chinese in a place that used to be a Roy Rodgers restaurant, you could tell by the wagon wheel chandeliers.  
“Never in a million fucking years,” she said taking a bite of shrimp and snow peas.   
“Why not? I mean he’s a good dad, stable, good lookin’, all that shit chicks…uh… women dig, right?” I said.  
Genie shook her head “Jimmy is like the original ‘boy who can’t say no’ for real. Anybody who comes onto him, he fucks. Anyone. He’s like... like he thinks it’s rude to turn anybody down and then he wonders why all his relationships sink like the Titanic. So yeah, he’s dumb and a total slut.”

“You don’t think he might, you know, see the error of his ways?” I asked.

“Yeah, right, it wouldn’t be worth it even if he did. Dude is definitely a five minute man,” she said.  
I blinked at Genie, kinda puzzled “Five minute man? I don’t get the reference.”

“No clever reference, Richie,” Genie said “Just a simple fact, the guy can’t fuck more than 5 minutes without coming, you could set your watch by him. Richie? Richie? Are you blushing?”

I tried to imagine how often women offered Jimmy sex. It didn’t seem like the world’s worst problem to have but on the other hand, if that was what lost him Genie…yeah. I got where she was coming from. Still if a guy like Jimmy wasn’t good enough for her, a guy like me didn’t have a chance in hell.

~~  
It was about three months after the whole thing started, the first of November, that she climbed in bed with me in the middle of the night.  
She’d gone with Jimmy to take the kids trick-or-treating. We watched a couple of scary movies, ate popcorn and leftover Halloween candy. I drank a few beers. Genie did her thing with the cards. As usual I didn’t ask her about it and she didn’t offer to tell me. The only thing that was different was that after she was done shuffling she turned to me in the blue t.v. light.  
“Wanna cut the cards, Richie?” she asked.  
“Okay,” I said taking a pull of my beer, reaching across the coffee table and cut the cards in three even stacks.  
She didn’t say anything else and neither did I.  
She laid out her cards and stared at them.  
I finished watching my movie.   
We went to bed.  
Me to mine; her to hers.  
It was crazy, one minute I was dreaming I was kissing Genie, not an uncommon occurrence, and the next thing I knew Genie's lips were skating over mine soft as a whisper and her tongue was in my mouth, right there in my bed, and she was naked. Not just naked, naked with her hand on my dick and my boxers around my knees.

It took me a minute to understand what was happening. Little as she was it was like I was drowning in Genie; the taste of her mouth, the feel of her skin, and fuck...her hand wrapped around my cock.  
That could not be right.  
“Cut it out,” I said and shoved her off me.

“Just go with it, Richie,” she said and fucking climbed ontop of me grabbing my face with both hands and putting her tongue right back in my mouth. Her hips were working pretty seriously at trying to settle something of mine inside something of hers.

I was trying to push her off again, but she meant it and somehow like while I was trying to throw her off, and she was tryin’ to hang on, bam! Like that …penetration…. then it was over before it even started. Like I wasn’t even all the way in when I started coming. I couldn’t even describe how it felt. It had nothing in common with, you know, rosy palm and her five sisters. The closest thing to it was being on acid. It was that amazing and that fucked up. I mean I wasn’t even all the way awake. I was in no way prepared for the most intense sensory experience of my life.

Thirty seconds later it was pretty fucking easy to throw her off. There was also cum everywhere. All over me, her, and the sheets.

“You bitch!” I yelled at her back. I’d rather it never happened, I’d rather die a fucking virgin than have it happen like that.

I laid there with my pillow over my face, listening to her running around the house. I wondered what she was looking for. Then she found it; her keys. I heard the front door slam and her piece of shit car sputter and choke to life.

I hated what she’d done and I hated that she left. I pulled up my boxers. I went to her room. She hadn’t even taken her purse, let alone the rest of her shit.

I couldn’t get back to sleep so I sat up, drinking coffee and being pissed off.  
Then I went to work, and that pissed me off, too, but that always pissed me off.

When I got home she was there, packing her shit.

I stood in the doorway to her room because I never went any farther than that.

“What the hell were you thinking?” I asked.

“I was thinking I’d be gone before you got back,” she said.

“If it was the other way around, if I did that to you, it’d be sexual assault,” I said “you know that, right?”

Genie gave me a dirty look “No, it wouldn’t ‘cause if you came to my room in the middle of the night I wouldn’t kick you out of bed. I’d fuck your brains out.”

“Is somethin’ wrong with your hearing, man? I told ya, you’re not obligated, you don’t have to… I ain’t helpin’ you out so’s you’ll sleep with me,” I said feeling my face get hot.

“No, you’re helping me out of the kindness of your heart. You made it real clear you're not interested,” she said it like the kindness of my heart was stupid and offensive to her on a basic level. Like the kindness of my heart was second best.

“I wasn’t lookin’ for my first time to be a pity fuck either,” I said.

“And all this shit you do for me, it’s not because you feel sorry for me?” Genie said throwing open the closet and pulling out all her clothes in one big armload.

I felt confused all of a sudden. Sure, I felt bad for the bad shit that happened to Genie but there wasn’t anything wrong with that. Was there? I mean I helped her out because somebody fucking needed to, besides I liked her. Helpin’ out somebody you like isn’t, you know, work. I didn’t want her owe me anything I wanted her to … I don’t know what I wanted her to do. Yeah, sure, I wanted Genie but I also wanted her to want me back the same way. Not, you know, climb ontop of me in my sleep because I was some loser who’d never done it before, just so I could say I had. All of a sudden I didn’t know what I was doing or why, I just knew I wished she wanted me, but she didn’t, she couldn’t. I knew it couldn’t happen. I do own a mirror. If regular looking, average, girls like Phoebe treated me like I was radioactive, what hope did I have with a hottie like Genie? None, that was what hope.

“You didn’t even use any kinda protection. What if you get pregnant? What’re you gonna do then? Have another abortion?” I asked, it was one of the dozens of things bumming me out all day.

“If it was yours I’d have it,” Genie said glaring at me “It’d give me something to do around here besides pick up your fucking dirty clothes.”

“Gimme a break, you can’t even take care of the kids you already got,” I said, even though I knew it was a low blow.

“You know what? Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you,” she said folding up her clothes and setting them neatly in the box, because no matter how pissed off she was she was also the only person alive more anal retentive than John Byers.

“Yeah, maybe you coulda if you had any fucking manners,” I said.

“Oh fuck you, Richie, any other guy would have been happy to…” she started but I cut her off.

“Yeah, well maybe I wanna have a choice,”

“Bullshit, Richie, you’re so fucking weird every time I try to get close to you you go in your room and close the door,” Genie said her face all pinched “I was trying to do us both a favor.” 

“How many times do I gotta tell you, don’t do me any favors, I don’t want your gratitude,” I said. 

“You don’t want my pity, you don’t want my gratitude, what the fuck do you want from me?” Genie yelled.

The truth was I just wanted her to like me, maybe love me, but that was lame. I mean what if she laughed? So I shrugged. 

Instead I watched as Genie put one box on top of another and grabbed her purse.

“Where you goin’?” I asked her.

“Darryl’s” she said.

Darryl was her old dealer/boyfriend.

After as hard as she worked to get clean I couldn’t believe it “Darryl?” I repeated like a moron “What about Bryan?”

“Bryan’s boyfriend hates me,” Genie said.

I guess she assumed Bryan would pick whoever the guy was over her, since Genie sold herself short as a rule.

“Yeah, but Darryl?” I asked.

“He wasn’t too hot on the idea either but I sucked his dick and all is forgiven. At least I don’t have to be your charity case anymore,” she said her hands open wide.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I said.

“You don’t get it, do you? You really don’t get it. I’ve got nowhere to go and I’ve got one thing I’m good at. One thing, that’s it,” she said “and it’s like you aren’t even interested in the only thing I have to offer. I mean, you’re worse than Bryan. At least he doesn’t want me because he’s gay. You aren’t interested, because you aren’t interested, ‘cause I’m not good enough or some shit.”

“I’m… interested, I just don’t want to do it for the wrong reasons,” I said “And I’m not buyin’ for a second that…that’s the only thing you’ve got to offer.”

I wouldn’t even know what day of the week it was without her to remind me. Without Eugenia I’d be living like a bear in a pile of old burrito wrappers. It wasn’t even funny how often I lost my students’ papers, though with their grades they would be lucky if they stayed lost. And of course Genie was the only one who could find them. She was like the most organized human alive. 

“What’re the right reasons? Tell me what the right reasons are for wantin’ to fuck somebody,” she said, standing there in front of the stack of boxes “’Cause I’m sick of sleeping by myself when I know you’re in there jerkin’ off. It’s like you don’t even think I’m good enough to make you come. You’d rather…”she pumped her fist up and down.

My brain was racing trying to come up with an answer to the question that had eluded me for a long damn time. So I stood there with my mouth open before I croaked out “Love?”

“What?” she yelled.

“Love’s a good reason to sleep with somebody,” I said pushing my glasses back up.

I was so lame. Skinner should have been there to shoot me.

“Love is bullshit,” Genie said.

“No, it’s not,” I said blocking the door “it’s real.”

“Get outta the way, Richie,” she said.

I didn’t know what to say so I shook my head. But I had to believe in love, kinda like I had to believe in democracy. If those things weren’t real or possible what was the fucking point of anything? 

“Get out of the way,” she repeated.

“I don’t want you to go,” I said.

“I’m going crazy sleeping by myself,” she said.

I didn’t know what to say or do, I’d never met anybody who could drive me nuts like Genie.

“Listen, Genie,” I said trying to articulate all the miserable fucking feelings swirling around my head “I can’t think of anything more pathetic than lovin’ somebody and wantin’ ‘em and bein’ desperate enough to settle for nothin’ but ...but...sex.” I wasn’t used to talkin’ to chicks about...you know, so the last word kind of came out sorta strangled.

“Thanks, Richie, thanks a fuckin’ lot for letting me know you think I’m pathetic,” Eugenia said looking like she was a half-step from yelling at me again, or maybe decking me “now get out of my way.”

“Wait, wait, no, I was talking about me. I’m the one that’s all stupid in love,” I said confused “You’re the one that said love was bullshit.”

“I’m in love with a guy who treats me like I’m his fucking mother or the maid or some shit but won’t lay a finger on me that’s how I know it’s bullshit,” Genie said “Will you let me through? Darryl’s expecting me.”

Was that what I was doing? That wasn’t what I meant to do. I meant to help her out and be nice to her and maybe make friends if that was possible. Somehow living together though…it wasn’t like living with Byers and Frohike. Something about her made me want to make her happy, so I did stuff I might not ordinarily do. But at the same time, seeing her little painted toes and knowing her tits, which I had already committed to memory the first night I met her, were under her shirt made me uncomfortable enough to leave the room on a daily basis.

Wait.  
She said she was in love with me? That didn’t sound right, or even possible.

“You really give Darryl a blow job?” I asked, both forearms resting on opposite sides of the door frame trying my best to block her way.

“Yeah, why?” she asked.

“I was thinkin’ about kissin’ ya but how long’s it been since you had his dick in your mouth?” I said. Was there an equation for the half-life of another guy’s dick in a chick’s mouth?

Apparently Genie thought that was pretty funny ‘cause she laughed “Like two maybe three hours ago, but I had a coke afterwards.”

“Put down the boxes,” I said lookin over her shoulder at the empty closer “Or, you know, you can put ‘em in my room. If you’re gonna be sleepin’ in there.”

“You mean it?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said pushing up my glasses “but what you did last night, that was pretty fucked up. Don’t do it again. And you’re gonna have to get on the pill or get some rubbers or something ‘cause I’m not, I’m not doin’ it without protection. When I have a kid I want it to be planned.”

Eugenia stood there blinking “You don’t have to kiss me.”

“Yeah,” I said because I knew I didn’t have to do anything I didn’t want to, I wondered if Eugenia knew the same went for her, too “But maybe I wanna, ever think about that?” I shrugged “Do I have to start with your mouth? He didn’t...um...do it to you, did he?”

Genie shook her head “He was too strung out for anything but a blow job.”

I nodded and followed Genie to my room. I watched her take her clothes out of the box and hang them next to mine in the closet.

“You swallow?” I asked my brain starting to strip its gears worrying about all the things I could get from Genie’s bad decisions. Technically I knew female to male transmission was disproportionately unlikely in most STDs and I’d hacked her medical records after the abortion. As of 9 weeks ago she’d been as clean as a whistle.

“Darryl’s all about the money shot,” Genie said giving me the side eye.  
That’s when I noticed she was wearing a lot less make-up than she usually did. Maybe she’d scrubbed it off when she washed his cum off her face.

Something in my chest felt like it had had all it could stand “You messed around with anyone else since you been here?”

Eugenia shook her head. 

Part of me wanted to tell her off her for what she’d done. I was never gonna have another first time and she’d ruined it, turned it into a big weird awkward mess. I knew it wasn’t as shitty as her first time or probably a bunch of other times after that. But why did she have to be that way? Why did she have to spill how fucked up sex had been for her all over me?

The other bigger smarter part of me wanted to pick her up and kiss her from her little painted toes to her crazy mixed up head. I mean how could I expect her to give me anything but what she had? How could I be anything but grateful in the end?

Jesus, she was a wreck.  
How much of a wreck was I that the threat of her leaving made me wish I was dead for real?

I sat down on the edge of my bed and buried my face in my hands. This was tough. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for relationships. 

Then I felt her hands on my head running through my stupid short hair.

“I’m sorry, Richie, I was trying to do somethin’ nice. Everything I do comes out all fucked up, ask Jimmy,” she said still sounding pissed off.

“Believe me, I know the feeling,” I said not looking up but instead pressing my face against her stomach. Being off dope she’d put on a little weight. She might not be in stripper pole shape but it was way nicer than when she was skin and bones.

 

“Is it cool if I touch you here?” I said lifting up the hem of her t-shirt, the red one that said -No Free Rides- “you know...on the bare skin?”

“You don’t have to ask,” she laughed “you can do whatever.”

I shook my head, it wasn’t supposed to be that way “I don’t want to be that guy.”

“What guy is that?” she asked.

“The guy that does whatever he feels like,” I said kissing her belly. It didn’t seem right for a grown person to have skin that was so soft.

“What guy do you want to be?” she asked.

“The guy you trust,” I said “The guy you like... love... maybe.”

“That’s why I said you could do what you want. Maybe that’s why I love you, I trust you,” she said her little hands clenched into fists. And I wanted to argue, I was lame and thoughtless a good part of the time, when I wasn’t being too scared to think. Besides, how much trust was too much? I was pretty sure she was giving me too much. Love? Really? How the fuck could Genie love me?

I mean I was in love with her for obvious reasons. She saved my ass on a regular basis and she was uber hot, not to mention how cool she was to hang around with. Yeah, I had it bad.

I brushed my fingertips against her waist. The thing that got me was the smell of her. I’d hardly ever been this close to a, you know, a chick before. She didn’t smell like a guy.

“Can I?” I asked holding onto the front of her shirt, wondering if I could raise it higher.

Genie nodded.

I pressed my mouth against her belly button, then a little bit above it, then higher and higher until I was almost to her bra and I stopped.

“Umm how ‘bout your jeans?” I asked.

“Okay,” she said and popped the buttons.

I peeled her jeans back slowly. This was way different than seeing her running around the club in a g-string and heels.   
I had imagined a lot of things in my life but it was funny that I had never imagined this. I had never imagined undressing a girl.  
Woman.  
Super Hot emotionally messed-up ex-stripper.  
Which had to be pretty fucking profound for me to notice.  
It was crazy because I felt about 73 different ways at once. It probably goes without saying I was so hard I was feeling a little dizzy. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to an academic fascination with the prospect of “hands on” experience with a female body. And it was Genie, making Genie happy made me feel like a million bucks, as an obvious corollary I was fucking petrified of disappointing her. Plus I kinda wanted to take notes and draw a schematic.  
I ran my hand over that constellation of moles on the outside of her thigh I’d wanted to touch the first time I’d seen it.  
For the first time in awhile I looked up at her face.  
Genie had a really pretty face.  
Like a little doll.  
If they made girls at the Sanrio factory they’d look like Genie.  
I looked like something somebody’s dad put together in the garage after he had a couple of beers.  
While I was looking at her face Genie stepped out of her jeans.   
I stood up and pulled her t-shirt over her head.  
Then Genie kinda leaned toward me in this weird way that confused me for a minute until I realized she meant for me to take off her bra. I went slow in an effort not to fumble and embarrass myself. I got it off more or less smoothly, I mean, I’m a twitchy guy, but I’ve got excellent hand eye coordination.  
My reward? Tits.  
I backed up to get a better look at them. I mean, I’d seen tits before, but never without paying for the privilege. The next words out of my mouth kinda happened on their own.  
“They real?” I asked, and as soon as the words were out I got scared Genie was gonna kick my ass, rescind her offer of sex at the bare minimum.  
Instead Genie looked like she was gonna laugh “touch ‘em and see.”  
Like I was gonna say “no” to that. So I did, I reached out and, oh god, I cupped Genie’s tits in my hands, they were so big I couldn’t get one whole boob in my hand, and I have pretty big hands. There was only one problem.  
“I don’t really ...uh ...I don’t know the difference. I uh…” I didn’t know how to say I’d never touched one before, real or not.  
“You never touched a tit before?” Genie seemed ...I don’t know what she seemed; incredulous maybe.  
“I’ve never done a lot of things,” I said, honestly.  
“Okay,” Genie said and put her little hands ontop of mine “Feel how soft my tits are?”  
“Yeah,” I whispered, because that was all I could do.  
“If they were saline they would just feel like I had a water balloon under my skin and with silicon you can feel that there’s an implant in there, usually along the bottom and the texture’s a little different. And now you know the difference between real tits and fake tits,” she said guiding my hands to sort of squeeze her tits and then she moved them off her tits all together and down to her panties.   
Eugenia looked at me.  
I looked at Eugenia.  
It was a Mexican standoff, pantywise. I ran my finger along the waist but terror was overtaking scientific curiosity and I found it pretty impossible to go any further. Genie put her tiny hands ontop of mine again and with her hands on my hands we eased her panties off her hips together.

“You wanna lay down on the bed?” I asked. It was awkward with the two of us standing up, I mean, I’m a foot taller than Genie. But it didn’t matter very long because before I knew it Genie was on the bed.  
Naked, there was a naked Genie on my bed. She put her hands behind her head and opened her legs. I stood there for awhile taking a good long look.  
It…I mean she… was shaved, completely bare.  
No wonder she took so long to get ready in the morning.  
In every way, shape, and form Euglena was high maintenance.  
What the hell was she doing with me, again?  
Oh right, I was nice to her. I was nice to her and she said she loved me.  
I was nice to her and she didn’t have any pubic hair.  
I would have liked it better if she had, you know, a little, but all she had was smooth smooth skin.  
Between the blood rushing in my ears and a chorus of “I am the luckiest boy in the world” echoing through my head I didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.  
“Can I ummm touch you?” I asked.  
“You better fucking touch me,” Genie said, like it was a threat.   
“Thanks,” I muttered because it seemed like the thing to say. Please and thank you, and what fucking rabbit hole have I fallen through for a guy like me to be here with a girl like you?  
I touched her painted toes, black, of course, where she wasn’t shooting up anymore. Traced the high arches of her little feet, as soft as I imagined, the curve of her calf, the underside of her knee, and the perfect stretch of her thigh which was incidentally the softest skin in the world and then I was there.   
It was a thing I’d sort of given up on. I couldn’t say when I’d lost all hope of ever being with a woman I just knew somewhere along the line I had. Unless I screwed up really bad, which I had to admit was still totally possible, it had happened, was happening, had a high probability of happening again.  
I traced the …ummm….slit with my finger.  
It was so slick it was shining all along the um opening and that meant…that meant she was turned on. I turned Genie on, at least a little, and that was completely crazy.  
“Can I umm?” I asked with one finger running as soft as I could manage up and down feeling the slit get wetter and wetter.  
“You fucking better,” she said.  
I had no choice but to swallow hard as I dipped two fingers into Genie. I had my fingers in a girl’s …holy fuck. For a minute my brain went completely blank, like it had shorted out or, you know, fallen prey to the blue screen of death.  
Like a light shining through a thick fog a thought came to me, I knew, theoretically, how this worked. It wasn’t technically complicated from what I’d read and I’d been reading about how to make a girl come for years. If I could build an MRI I could probably do that, probably. The important part was to go slow and not to overwhelm the sensory circuits. With my free hand, the one that didn’t have two fingers up inside Genie, I opened her…um labia for closer inspection. My first thought was about how pink it was and my second was her clitoris. It was tiny and shining and stood up like a little…I didn’t have anything to compare it to. And one more time that pink was my new favorite color. I laid two fingers ontop of her clit and stroked softly. With the fingers that were inside Genie I felt around gently, keeping in mind I was an awkward loser and could probably screw up and hurt her without wanting to. Picturing an anatomical drawing in my head I felt her cervix and carefully curled my fingers upward to what I figured would be more or less the right spot careful to keep the pressure gentle and even. 

She started making a noise, like a little whimpery squeak like I never heard her make before.

I jumped back “SorryDidIHurtYouIDidn’tMeanToHurtYou?”.

“If you stop I’m gonna kill you,” she said, which was a good sign, better than “go away, loser,” for sure.

“’Kay,” I said and I laid back down between her legs, hanging halfway off the bottom of the bed, sticking the fingers that had been inside of her in my mouth. Not exactly cherry Kool-Aid but not bad, kinda like Sweet Tarts minus the sweet. I slid my fingers back inside her and found the spot again. Now her hips were rising and falling to meet my fingers pushing inside her as I opened my mouth and put my tongue against her clit. Genie was sweating and shaking and there was a constant string of “fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck” coming out of her mouth. My glasses were smeared with um pussy juice or, I thought about it, Bartholin’s fluid was the technical name and I’m a technical type guy, and she was pushing so hard against me I wasn’t sure what to do so I stopped licking and sort of sucked her tiny little clit into my mouth. It was pretty much the only part of her I hadn’t seen that night at the club. I was still pretty shocked at how small it was. Not like in porn. Pea-sized and not, like, a big pea either. Honest to god it was that tiny.

Her ass came completely off the mattress and she shouted “Goddamn, Richie.” Her legs shaking and her back arched.

Well, I’d call that a success. If I didn’t feel sick to my stomach from being so hard for so long I’d have been on top of the world.

“You really never had sex with a woman before?” Genie asked halfway sitting up.

“I read a lot,” I said in my defense.

Genie looked around the room at the books stacked on every lateral surface.

“Kiss me, Richie,” Genie said, so I did. I crawled up to lay next to her, still dressed from work, I kissed her smearing her juice all over both our faces with an all too familiar pain settling into my balls.

I didn’t know what to do, was there a protocol? I mean, Genie was gorgeous. A cat in a bag, but gorgeous. It went without saying, like every other guy in the room, I wanted to see her naked. I felt like I needed to ring some kind of warning bell before I took any clothes off, still if I didn’t do something soon I was gonna die. It felt like that anyway.

“Fuck me, Richie,” Genie said between kisses, unbuttoning my jeans.

Holy Shit. I never knew chicks said stuff like that in the real world.

“We don’t have any protection,” I said kissing behind her ear, because much as I wanted to, oh my god, I wanted to so bad, but I wasn’t stupid. I kissed that sweet spot again. Fuck! She was fucking delicious everywhere.

“You can pull out,” she said, like saying it would make it true. 

“Yeah, right,” I couldn’t help but laugh, it was both dumb and highly unlikely.

“Want me to suck your cock?” she asked and I pulled back for a minute. All I could think about was Darryl.

“Maybe tomorrow,” I said the last thing I ever expected to say when offered a blow job. Not that I ever expected to be offered a blow job. 

“Fuck my ass, then,” she said, like that was something girls said in the real world. But I guess, in this case it was. I now lived in a world where girls requested I anally penetrate them. Well, one girl, but that was exponentially more than ever made the offer before. Any offer actually.

“I don’t know,” I stumbled “I don’t really know how. I never...well anything… I mean.. I don’t wanna hurt you,” I said, because I didn’t.

“But do you want to? Would you like to try it?” she asked like she did when she was offering me a bite of food off her plate.

“Well, yeah,” I said because I did…I just didn’t want to fuck it up.

“Go get my purse,” she said “there are two hand creams in there, bring me the blue bottle.” I swear that chick had more beauty products than a fucking Walgreens.

I jumped out of the bed and ran after her purse in the other room.

“And take your damn clothes off,” she yelled after me.

When I came back, still in the middle of setting some sort of land speed record for getting naked, hopping on one foot while I pulled off my jeans and my left shoe at the same time, Genie was sitting on the edge of the bed.

I felt a little weird. I mean I was still hard and all but as turned on as I was I was equally uncomfortable. I’d never been naked in front of anyone before. 

“You okay, you look like you’re about to pass out?” Genie said.

“I’ve never, I’ve never had, you know, my clothes off in front of, you know, another person before,” I said.

She looked me up and down “You look okay, I’ve seen a lot worse,” then Genie ran her hand from my stomach to my chest “Actually,” she said very slowly, I don’t remember her ever saying “actually” when we first lived together, “You’ve got a nice looking cock.”

“Yeah? I didn’t know that was a thing,” I said trying to slow down my breathing. It didn’t work. 

Genie laughed and wrinkled up her nose “I’ve seen some ugly dicks in my life.”

“I know I’m not real…” there were about a million adjectives that would fit, too many for me to pick one.

She rubbed two fingers over my nipple, and a shudder went through my whole body, she was left-handed like me. We had that in common. That one thing. 

“I like how smooth you are. It’s very clean. Hairy guys gross me out,” she said.

Good. That was good. Whatever Genie liked was good. Even if I spent my whole life feeling embarrassed about it before she said she liked it. 

I couldn’t think of anything to say, I couldn’t think period, when she leaned forward and swiped her tongue from my balls to the tip of my dick. I didn’t know it was physically possible to get as hard as I was at that moment.

“Jesus Fuck! What’d you do that for?” is what I think I said, but I coulda said anything. I coulda been speaking in tongues for all I knew.

“I wanted to,” Genie laughed.

“If you do that again I’m gonna be…done,” I said feeling light headed.

“Okay,” Genie and she took the hand cream out of my fist. Then she opened my hand and squirted some of it, way more than I expected really, onto my palm “Remember,” she said looking me right in the eye “Be careful, okay? You could really hurt me if you get rough.”

The thought of hurting Genie was just terrifying enough to keep me from coming the minute I touched her. 

And then she climbed back on the bed, and there she waited on her hands and knees.   
For me.  
To fuck her.  
In the ass.  
I smeared the lotion on my dick, trying not to have a heart attack while I went over the theoretical mechanics of the situation. I might not have had any practical experience but I wasn’t stupid. I picked up the tube of lotion from the mattress and squeezed a little more in my hand. Kneeling behind her on the bed I slipped one lubricated finger into Genie’s ass, my heart pounding. It was tighter than I’d imagined. It was a fucking wonder I hadn’t had an aneurysm. Genie rocked her hips against my hand and I started to slip a second finger inside her.  
“Richie?” she said.  
“Yeah?” I answered, barely able to form the word.  
“Be careful,” she said “Go slow, okay?”  
“Am I hurtin’ you?” I asked, tensing up “Want me to stop?”  
“No, no, just let me get used to it. Don’t get rough,” Genie said and she sounded worried maybe.  
I went slow but it was a tight squeeze. Both in her ass and in my chest.  
I ducked my head and kissed her spine.  
I reached around with my other hand and brushed her clit, grateful, for once, for long arms and a tiny Genie. I pressed my face to her back again, both hands in a steady rhythm, I figured it worked for me it oughta work for her, and me I had a lot of experience with. There was no way on fucking earth I was going to last much past penetration. The last thing I wanted was for Genie to hate me or laugh at me or even know how lame I truly was. Besides, I better not embarrass myself too bad if I wanted her to let me do it again.  
Whatever else Genie was uptight about and made difficult, having an orgasm was not on the list. Her pussy was dripping wet and her ass had relaxed while she shook against me.   
Genie was still breathing hard when I let go of her and pulled away for a second.  
“Are ya ready?” I asked as I came up behind her, one hand on her waist. The ratio between her waist and her ass was amazing.  
“Uh huh,” Genie said “Go ahead.”  
“I’m not gonna be very…ummm….this isn’t going to last very long,” I warned her.  
“Come on and fuck me, Richie,” she said.  
“I can do that,” I said, even though I didn’t believe it for a second.  
I counted to five while my dick bounced against Genie’s ass, smearing lube in a shiny line. I took a deep breath, took my dick in my hand and positioned the head of my dick against her...um... opening. In spite of everything I’d done to help, you know, loosen her up, it was harder to get in than I expected. Maybe it was dumb of me but I was surprised. My brain was like a partitioned hard drive, part of me couldn’t think of anything past a dazzling wowowowowowowwwowowowowowowowowowowowowowwowowowwow and another part was screaming in terror at the potential for disaster, and a third part was barely, just barely holding it together analyzing the whole venture from an engineering perspective.  
My dick seemed to have a mind of its own and wanted, desperately, to fuck her as hard as I could, but my brain was still winning. I held back in spite of what my body was screaming and pushed slow and steady past the ring of muscle until I was all the way in, inside Genie. I didn’t have words to describe how tight it was. Or how hot in every sense of the word. I reached around to touch her pussy, it was so wet I started to tremble, my hips slammed against Genie and like that I was shooting 33 years worth of fear, disappointment, frustration, everything, everything I had, up inside Genie. Was this what we did to them? What men did to women? Pour out every fucked up thing we carried around on to them? Into them? I was surprised I didn’t knock her down but Genie was surprisingly tough. Tougher than me for sure. I couldn’t explain it but I couldn’t stop shaking. 

I whispered something in her ear, I think it was “I love you” or maybe “I can die now.” Those were my two thoughts, anyhow.

 

I don’t know how long I laid there shivering like that but the next time Genie came in my line of sight she was wet and naked with her hair in a towel.

“Richie?” she said putting her hand on my face “are you gonna be okay?”

I forced myself to nod because I couldn’t trust my vocal cords to work.

“I cleaned your glasses,” she said.

I nodded again because that was nice, that was good, that was cool of her. She didn’t have to do that.

I couldn’t make myself stop shaking. I couldn’t make sense of anything happening around me.

“Richie, get up,” Genie said pulling on my hand “C’mon.”

It seemed like a lot of effort. Genie wasn’t having it, though, she pulled on my arms until I gave up and stumbled after her. It seemed like she would have dragged me if I hadn’t followed her, she didn’t care that I had 50 lbs on her. She wasn’t gonna give up until she got me out of that bed. She shook the towel off her head and pushed me into the shower. There we stood under the hot water and she soaped me up all over, paying extra attention to certain areas, which probably would have been real sexy if I hadn’t been all freaked out. We stayed under the water until it went cold.

Genie ran a towel over me until I was dry then helped me put on some clothes, Sweatpants and my Motorhead shirt, kissing me five times in the process. Not that I was complaining but the kissing wasn’t helping. It was like I was stuck in my own loop-line-shunt. It couldn’t be real, could it? Me and Genie? It seemed impossible but I clearly remembered …stuff. Had I lost my fucking mind? Things felt surreal and watery and I kept expecting to wake up alone on a wet mattress at any moment.

Sitting there trying to sort out everything that happened, I didn’t even realize Genie was standing right in front of me, holding my hands.

“Richie! Richie? When is the last time you ate? Real food, not tootsie rolls and candy corn,” she asked shaking me a little.

My brain was running slow slow slow, I scrolled back through the day and then the day before “Some time yesterday, no, day before, you were gone to the kid’s play yesterday.”

“Jesus, Richie,” Genie said racing around the house all of a sudden “do you not eat if I’m not here?”

“Sorry,” I shrugged. She was probably right. It wasn’t on purpose though, I didn’t mean to forget to eat, I just didn’t think about it if she wasn’t around to remind me. Before this whole witness protection bullshit Frohike used to bitch me out for the same shit. I guess I couldn’t be counted on to remember certain things. I’m distractible, so sue me.

I mean I guess it took some time but it seemed like just a second later Genie brought me a plate with two grilled cheese sandwiches and a glass of tea.

“Eat!” she said “You do this again and I’m gonna kick your ass.”

“Sorry, dude, I get distracted,” I said my mouth full of sandwich “I forget shit.”

“What the hell did you do when you lived by yourself?” she asked.

I shrugged stuffing the last bite in my mouth “I dunno, I never lived by myself.”

Genie kinda stopped for a second before she took my plate and put it in the bubbly sink “Me neither.”

I was slowly coming to the realization I didn’t die. I had actual sex with an actual girl who actually liked me and who I liked back, who had made me something to eat and was currently washing my dishes. Somethin’ about the whole thing made me uncomfortable. Like it had to be a trick.

“You still hungry?” Genie asked from the sink.

“Yeah,” I said because I was.

“Wanna go to Denny’s or somethin’ ? We could get some condoms on the way home,” Genie said.

“So I passed? I was okay? Okay enough?” I said “You wanna be my girlfriend or whatever?”

Genie didn’t say anything. At first I thought I had screwed up somehow but she was staring at me with her forehead all wrinkled up like a sharpei.

“That wasn’t a test, Richie,” she said.

Yeah, right, it was the biggest test of my life, more like. “But if I’d messed up too bad you wouldn’t uh been real eager to give me a second shot,” I said cause I don’t know when to shut up.

Genie walked over from the sink, in slow motion like, wiping her hands on a towel. She stopped and stood in front of me without saying anything long enough to make me worry.

Finally she breathed in “Put your shoes on, let's get outta here.”


	4. Hard Promises

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which our hero gets everything he ever wanted, and it's more complicated than he imagined.

Genie was dressed by the time I found my shoes and got them on. We went to Denny’s. I had the steak and eggs. Genie had a sundae. She was like that. She’d just as soon eat ice cream as pretty much anything else. Certain places I’d take her she’d rather have a sundae than, you know, a real meal.

We stopped at Walgreens, Genie bought condoms. A big box. As soon as we were home she set them ontop of my dresser. I stood in the doorway and watched her. I expected my brain to be all over the place but I found I couldn’t think anything. It was all too strange.

We went to the couch and turned on Jeopardy. There, as always, was Trebek, the smug dick, and I wondered for the millionth time who the fuck knew all the opera questions, and why.

Genie didn’t sit down on the other end of the couch, instead she sat real close. So close my thigh touched her thigh and my side touched her side. I glanced at her in between glaring at Trebek, wondering what I was supposed to do. Would it be cool if I put my arm around her? In, like less than 24 hours we’d done pretty much everything I knew about, that wasn’t, you know, weird. I didn’t think there was a single square inch anywhere on Euglena where I hadn’t had my hands. I guessed I could probably put my arm around her.

So I did.

Genie didn’t look at me but she did turn and sort of snuggle against my chest and I had the weird sensation of not really being in my own body, of maybe floating a few feet overhead, watching everything I did from above. This was all wrong. Shit like this didn’t happen to Ringo Langly. I was probably in the hospital. This had to be an elaborate morphine inspired dream or a coma or maybe we really had died in D.C. and this was as close as I was gonna get to heaven. For a while I was afraid to move too quickly, or to think about it too hard. Afraid I’d wake myself up.

I kept watching Jeopardy, holding perfectly still, feeling Genie’s little body against mine. Taking a peek every once in a while at her pretty face.

After Jeopardy I flipped channels for a while. I know we watched somethin’ but I can’t say what. Mostly I was paying attention to Genie, even if I was afraid to look at her. We sat there together for a couple of hours, I guess. And then I looked up to see she was holding my hand in both of hers, her index finger kinda stroking the inside of my palm. And like that I was hard, again, and Genie was all over me; her mouth like, I dunno, all over my chest. She pulled my shirt off and her hands, lips, tongue were skating over my chest, arms, shoulders, and I started to shudder, not like, because I was coming but because it was too much being touched like that. Way too much.

Genie stopped and pulled away enough to talk “Richie? Are you okay?”

“I…I’m not used to this, people don’t usually touch me very much. You gotta slow down ‘til I get acclimated,” I said and feeling brave in a way I’d never felt brave in my life I reached out and cupped her cheek in my hand and kinda pulled her face to my face and slowly, very slowly kissed her mouth.

Genie’s tongue went into my mouth and then one kiss at a time her lips made a trail to my ear “When is the last time somebody touched you, Richie? Somebody besides me?”

I didn’t even have to think about it “May,” I said pressing my mouth against her ear.

“Who was it?” she asked kinda nibbling on my neck while she interrogated me.  
“Hacker friend of mine, sort of a friend, sort of an enemy,” I said not really thinking.

“What’s his name?”

“Her, Yves,” I said, only remembering afterwards that Yves’ real name was Lois Runtz.

“She hot?” Genie asked in my ear, her voice all sexy and husky.

“Way hot,” I said, because that was true, too.

Genie sat up all of a sudden and looked at me. If I didn’t know better I’d swear she was jealous.

“What did she do?” Genie asked not sounding turned on at all “How did she touch you? Where?”

“On the hand,” I said automatically telling the truth because it was a dumb question. 

“How? Show me,” Genie said “I’ll be you and you be this Yves chick.”

I blinked. We’d been having so much fun. A little overstimulation not withstanding. And now Genie was acting like some …oh, I guess this was where Jimmy’s “crazy bitch” came in. 

I was willing to believe Genie that Jimmy cheated. I was also willing to believe, based on what I knew of Genie, that she might be less than relaxed about that sort of shit, girl was not exactly low key, but fuck, I didn’t even know Genie when Yves touched my hand. And second of all…she touched my freaking hand, that was all. Thirdly; Yves? Really? Yves was way too hot for me, almost as hot as Genie.

Genie sat up stiff as a board with her hands in front of her on her thighs. I guess that was her imitation of yours truly.

I reached out my right hand, because that was the one Yves used, and laid it ontop of Genie’s.

“Somethin’ like that,”

“She hotter than me?” Genie asked, cringing alittle.

Not did you have a snowball’s chance in hell with her? Not did she ever even give indication she noticed that you might be, you know, male? Nope. The question was did I think she was hotter than Genie?

Jimmy was at least a little bit right about Genie being nuts. Any chick that jealous over a guy like me had to be.

I shook my head “Nah, your tits are way bigger.”

“Really?” she asked.

“Yeah, like,” I pictured Yves in that leather thing she wore and calculated “like more than twice the volume.”

Apparently that was the right thing to say because Genie pulled her shirt over her head and grinned at me in her push-up bra “Wanna double check?”

Like I was gonna turn that offer down. Right.  
She reached her arms behind her to take off her bra.

“Leave it on. I kinda wanna do that part myself, when I get there,” I said.

And we kinda traded places from how we were before. I kissed her fingertips, the inside of her wrist, her shoulder. I wanted to lick all of her she was so ...fuck...I couldn’t think of the right word for how good every thing about Genie was. From there I tasted her collar bone and when I couldn’t wait any more my mouth went to her tits. They were big enough that it was easy to push them together and get both her nipples in my mouth at once, her bra pushed down around her little ribcage. It was both cool and interesting to see how the minute I started touching them the nipples got hard and stood up as big as the first joint of my finger. 

I went out of my head a little, then, half ontop of Genie, half grinding against the sofa while I sucked first one tit and then the other. Fuck. I could have come that way, from just sucking Genie’s tits. The way they felt in my hands, in my mouth, it didn’t just make my dick hard, it gave me goosebumps, it was like the best thing I ever felt.

“I wanna fuck you,” I whispered in her ear. I wasn’t sure if I was capable of saying a thing like that out loud.

“Yeah?” Genie said.

“Wanna go in the bedroom and …you know?” I asked “I think maybe I can last a little longer this time.”

Genie reached up and put her arms around my neck, pulling me down to kiss her again.

Hard as it was to believe she broke the kiss to say “I want you so bad.”

It was such a weird thing to hear it freaked me out and confused me, for the first time in a while I lost my hard on, even while I let her drag me to the bedroom. I was suddenly painfully aware that I didn’t have a shirt on. 

I felt naked and bare and incredibly white. This had to be a sick joke. She couldn’t possibly mean it.

I stood in the middle of the bedroom while Genie wiggled out of the rest of her clothes.  
“C’mere,” Genie said holding her arms out to me. Naked. Beautiful. Perfect. Really fucking perfect. Holding her arms out to me.  
I was torn between not being able to believe it was real and not being able to say “no”. Like somebody’s Labrador retriever I came when she called. My dick was hard again, too. 

“What do you want me for, Genie?” I asked holding onto my glasses so I could see what was happening.

Genie stroked my cheek with the back of her hand “I love you, Richie.”

“Why?” I asked, because I had to.

“’Cause you’re really smart, maybe the smartest person I ever met, and you’re a fucking stand up guy. Like I never knew there were guys like you. I heard about it, yeah. But all the men I ever knew were cheaters, or liars or just fucking useless fucks who’d stand around sayin’ what a shame it was the world was such a shitty place but they wouldn’t lift a finger to change anything. I heard there were decent men out there but I never met any and nobody I knew had either. You’re like...trustworthy; the first trustworthy man I’ve ever met in my life. It’s like finding Bigfoot or a unicorn or some shit. Like finding a unicorn and you like most of the same music, and he’s fun to hang out with, and the first time he tries he eats pussy better than Jimmy ever thought about,” Genie said.

“You sure you love me?” I asked.

“Sure I’m sure,” Genie said kissing me again, and again and running her hands through my hair “Richie, it’ll be easier for me to come if I’m on top.”

How was I gonna argue with that? “A’right, but go slow, okay?” I said as Genie started kissing her way down my chest, then she kissed the top button of my jeans.

‘Pop’ she undid a button and kissed the skin underneath.

‘Pop’ another button and another kiss in the space where it had been.

‘Pop’ another kiss right on the front of my boxers.  
‘Pop’ and a kiss and all I could hear was blood rushing in my ears.  
‘Pop’ one less button and one more kiss.

“Lift up,” Genie said and in one move pulled my jeans off my hips. 

Genie was as good as her word and worked my jeans down my legs, stopping every few inches and planting a soft kiss on my legs as my jeans came down. She had barely touched me and I felt like my whole body was buzzing.

My boxers stood at attention. 

“Get a...a... get a rubber. Okay?” I asked and when she jumped up I stripped off my boxers. My brain was barely functioning. All I could do was get naked and hope for the best.

Technically I knew how to put a condom on. I’d even bought them before…not that they ever got used.

It wasn’t the same as watching Genie squeeze the air out of the tip and roll the tight sheath down on my dick, the smell of latex sharp in the air and Genie’s mouth hanging open while she concentrated.

I held my breath as Genie threw one leg over my hips and slowly kinda brought herself straight down onto my dick. It was a tighter fit than I expected. Like, she’d had kids, right? It didn’t seem like she should have been so damn tight. Her hair had fallen in her face and her big round tits pointed straight ahead, shaking just a little as Genie leaned forward.

I never thought I’d think about a girl’s face in a moment like that, but I did. I reached up and brushed Genie’s hair out of her face, because I wanted to see her expression while she was riding me, rising and falling on my cock. Her long hair swinging, her mouth open. It was a good thing I’d already come twice in less than 24 hours or I would have been wavin’ the white flag. As it was I felt strange. A beautiful girl loved me. And now her body and my body and …uh…yeah. I didn’t know anything could feel like that. I didn’t know I could feel like that.

And then, then, Genie gripped hold of my shoulders, hard, her eyes shut, and I could feel it. I felt her, you know, her suddenly get even tighter, and it took, you know, everything, everything I had, not to start coming right along with her once I realized what was happening, her tits shaking and her hips grinding hard against mine. 

She was still for about 20 seconds and then I felt her spine go stiff as she began to ride me again. The same rhythm but harder, rougher, now, and I was fighting the urge to shoot everything I had and I didn’t know, after awhile if I fighting not to come or fighting to make Genie come again so I could unclench my jaw and my gut and Jesus I couldn’t hold back any more I was coming and Genie was coming again and without thinking I grabbed her face smashed it against mine; her tongue in my mouth my cock in her pussy, everything was happening at once and I felt like something was squeezing my brain from inside my skull.

Genie sort of poured off of me, like she’d suddenly turned to liquid. I moved to the other side of the bed, making room for her, pulling off the condom and kind of making a mess in the process. Fuck. I wiped my dick with the sheet, hoping Genie wouldn’t object, it seemed like the kind of thing she might object to.

“No fair,” I said turning back toward her and putting my arm around her again.

“Huh?” she said.

“You came twice,” I said, teasing her, it seemed funny at the time, afterwards I felt like a dumbass. My mouth works like that sometimes.

“Not my fault you got a big dick,” she said cuddling up to me.

“I do?” I asked. I was a big dick. I’d heard that one before, for sure, but not the other. It was the one way in which I thought of myself as average.

“How do you not know that?” Genie asked propping herself up on one elbow to look at me “Didn’t you take gym?”

“With a bunch of guys four years older than me,” I said.

Genie shook her head and laughed “Man, Richie, you are such a dumbass sometimes.”

“Yeah, but a dumbass with a big dick,” I couldn’t help but smile.

 

~~  
Something else happened that was almost as big a deal as the sex.   
That night, in bed, after getting naked with Genie three different times in less than 24 hours we put on pajamas, kissed five or six or twenty more times and laid there in the dark.

“What happened to you, Richie?” Genie asked.   
She was layin’ behind me with her arm wrapped around my chest.  
“Nothin happened to me,” I said, because it was true.   
“You know all about me,” Genie said, and that was true, too. I’d seen it when I hacked her records. Her mom’s second husband. A stint in foster care before she was sent to live with her grandparents. Her mom telling the Child Protective Services worker Genie was a liar and a slut, who slept with older boys on a regular basis. And the CPS worker believed her. All that shit while I was mostly looking for her maiden name, Black Star, so I could check some other things.  
“Nothin’ to tell really, like really nothin’,” I said “I mean, my mom left one day when I was in kindergarten, I don’t even remember her.”  
Genie hugged me tighter “not at all?”  
“Mmmmm,” I thought about it “Maybe a little but it’s kinda hazy, you know.”  
“What do you remember?” Genie asked.  
“She wasn’t like the other kids’ moms,” I said because that was the easiest way to describe it.  
“Like how?”Genie asked.  
“Like she was cool. She had a lot of records. Like Jimi Hendrix and 13th Floor Elevators,” I said “And she was really, you know, pretty, but not…like a mom.”  
“Sexy?” Genie asked.  
It was too weird to say yes to.  
“I’ve got a picture,” I said instead.  
“Just one?” she asked slipping her hand inside my t-shirt and running her little thumb down the middle of my chest.  
“When she left,” I said taking a deep breath “My dad kinda threw everything away.”  
“But you’ve still got it?” she asked.  
“Yeah,’ I said, what else was there to say?  
“Can I see?” she asked with her lips against my ear.   
It was kinda impossible to say no so I shrugged in the dark.  
But Genie seemed excited. She jumped out of bed and turned on the light.  
“Where is it?” she asked.  
I stayed exactly where I was, I even kept my eyes closed “Back of my sock drawer,” I said.  
I laid there and listened while Genie ran and got my picture. I’d never showed it to anyone before. But no one ever…I guess it was a day for a lot of firsts.   
“Oh Richie, she’s beautiful,” Genie said “Like really beautiful…like…like…Bridget Bardot.”  
“But blonder,” I said, I’d thought the same thing looking at the picture, maybe a hundred times.  
“Yeah, like a natural platinum blonde,” Genie said.  
“Yeah,” I said still not turning around to look at the picture with her, I half-way wanted to, I half-way wanted to ask her to put it back “I guess I got that from her, I don’t really look like my dad, either. Or I dunno a bad combination of both.”  
“How did they meet?” she asked.  
“Don’t know,” I said “My grandma said one day he brought her home from Lincoln but she wasn’t from there. She was from the West Coast. Kind of a hippy, I guess.”  
It was really mostly a guess. I mean, my dad wouldn’t talk about her, and everything my grandma said was both vague and bitchy. Like my mom was this whole big puzzle and all I had were two pieces. One was the picture, me and her on the day I came home from the hospital; her with her long straight blonde hair and bangs almost covering up her big 1969 eye makeup, standing in front of the stupid fucking farmhouse, in boots and a miniskirt holding a lump of blankets that was supposed to be me, at least according to the writing on the back of the picture.  
The other piece was my name. I mean I knew for a fact she was the one that named me, not my dad. I’ve spent a lot of time wondering if it was a joke or, you know, an honest tribute.   
See my dad’s name was John Paul, you know, like half the Beatles, or later on, the pope. I mean, he’s still alive and that’s still his name, but yeah, John Paul Langly, that’s my dad. I’m sure my grandparents named him after some relative, because he was born in 1951, and also the Langlys as a group are boring as shit.  
But my mom named me Richard George, so between me and my dad, she had all the Beatles. She was the one that started calling me Ringo, never called me anything else according to my Grandma.  
“But you looked for her, right?” Genie asked but then sort of didn’t ask. She knew I can be a little focused sometimes.  
“It was the reason I got into computers in the first place, lookin’ for my mom,” I said.  
I rolled onto my back and Genie laid beside me, holding the picture so we could both look at it.  
“I got your glasses,” she said setting them across my face “Did you find her?” I guess it was the next obvious question.  
“When I went to college,” I said looking at my mom’s boots and her blank stare “sort of, turned out she died when I was 10.”  
“That sucks,” Genie said.  
“Yeah,” I said thinking less about losing my mom and more about all the questions I would never be able to answer. Questions like why she left me, and why the hell she married my dad in the first place.  
“What did she die of?” Genie asked, kinda putting her head on my shoulder.  
“She O.D.ed,” I said because it was true.  
Genie didn’t say anything for a long time.  
That was probably the first time since my mom left that I didn’t feel mad at my dad. The first time since I was 5 years old. It was the first time I realized whatever the fuck happened between them might have been at least partly been on her. Yeah, he was stubborn, and as unimaginative as fuck, and his range of conversation was pretty much limited to cattle prices and grain prices and was it going to rain. But he stuck around and he tried which was more than my mom was able or willing to do.   
“I wonder sometimes, you know,” I said it out loud and then didn’t want to finish my sentence.  
“What do you wonder, Richie?” Genie asked running her forefinger along my arm.  
“If maybe the reason she ditched him, you know, my dad, was because he was …”I shook my head afraid to say it. Afraid saying it about him would make it real for me.  
“Because he was what?” Genie asked “What was he?”  
“My dad’s kinda, you know, awkward…uncool…kinda like me I guess,” I said looking hard at the picture.   
Maybe my mom didn’t look blank in that picture, maybe she looked scared.  
My dad was no good at shit like feelings. He couldn’t even admit he had them. He didn’t want to be that way, he just was.  
“Like the reason you’re gonna leave me, in the end, is ‘cause I’m…you know…like him,” I said, wiping my eyes. Damn allergies.  
“I’m not goin’ anywhere. I love you, Richie,” Genie said pressing her lips against the corner of my mouth.  
Sure, she said that now, but she might be singing a different tune a year down the road. She had already almost gone back to Darryl because I was a fuck up. I felt sick thinkin’ about what could have happened. I felt sick thinking how much it was like my mom and dad. I never really felt sorry for my poor dumb dad until that minute.  
Genie took care of me a lot like how my dad took care of me. Genie loved me. I guess the thing I had been scared to admit to myself was the reason I didn’t mind doing stuff to help Genie was because I loved her back.   
I felt like a dumbass for realizing at the age of fucking 33, that my uptight, boring, farmer dad loved me, too.   
“Now’s the part where you say you love me,” Genie said squeezing me tight.  
My allergies were getting worse, my eyes running pretty hard.  
“I love you so bad, Genie,” I said and Genie kinda… well, she was little but she scooped me up, kinda half sitting, so my head was on her chest, then she I dunno rocked me back and forth, holding me close. I think I fell asleep like that.  
When I got up in the morning my picture was back in my sock drawer.

 

~  
I always imagined having a girlfriend, like regular in-house pussy, like some guys do, would change everything.

The funny part was having Eugenia for my girlfriend wasn’t all that different from having Eugenia for my room mate. I mean, it was, and then again it wasn’t. Like she still came in and straightened my office and my calendar and made sure I had my paperwork filled out, even if she shut the door and gave me a big wet kiss before she got started and I didn’t have to feel so bad about checking out her ass when she bent over the filing cabinet. She did all the stuff she always did at home. Scrubbed everything. Kept all my books and shit in order. We watched movies and listened to music. She might have cooked a little more often but not like, every day. And what she did cook was like, you know, grandma type food; beans and cornbread, meatloaf, that kind of thing. Nothing exotic, nothing like what Frohike whipped up. In light of the low blood sugar fiasco she started forcing me to eat breakfast before I left for school. I got to see her without make-up in the mornings. She didn’t look bad, just young, like baby-faced. My peck on the cheek got upgraded to tongue when she handed me my travel mug full of coffee on my way out the door. My life was divided into three parts; teaching idiots, working on my dissertation, and Euglena.

The biggest adjustment was probably sleeping with Euglena. Not sex. I mean the actual sleeping. I never shared a bed with anybody before. It was hard to get to sleep and hard to stay asleep with a beautiful chick, right there, snuggled up against me. I musta woke up five or six times a night for awhile and just you know, laid there, thinking about Genie, looking at her face, wondering how I lucked out.

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I jerked off a time or two, just layin’ next to her, watchin’ her sleep, thinkin’ about how pretty she was and how much I liked her.

About a week after that first time we were laying in the bed, Genie’s head between my legs, her little fist wrapped around my dick. It was Genie’s theory that a blow job a day would take the edge off, help me get used to, you know, sex, and in the end help me last longer when it came to, you know, the main course.

Like I was gonna argue with a dailly hummer. Obvious benefits aside it already seemed to be working and it felt amazing. Genie’s kung fu was the best. She wasn’t kidding when she said she was good at sex. She was more than good. It seemed to me Genie was to all things dirty as I was to hacking and cracking. She was a goddess. A sex goddess. And I belonged to her as sure as if she had an electronic monitor on my ankle. It was surreal and I was a lucky lucky boy.

“Richie, I think we ought to go to your dad’s for Thanksgiving,” she said, laying between my legs my dick about three inches from her cheek.

“What about the girls?” I asked pushing my glasses so I could see her better. The show was almost as important the way it felt. I mean, it was still hard to believe at that point; a real live girl, right there, with my dick in her mouth and I didn’t even have to ask her. I had to watch closely to make sure it was real.

“Jimmy’s taking them to his mom’s house in Tulsa this year, she barely let me in the front door when we were married,” Genie said rubbing the head of my dick against her lower lip.

“I dunno Genie, I haven’t seen him in a while,” I said wishing I had enough braincells firing to change the subject. I had to struggle not to hyperventilate.

“How long’s a while?” she asked drawing little spirals on my balls with her fingertips. 

Damn. My whole body was shivering.

“Breathe, Richie, and answer the question,” Genie said running one finger over my balls, drawing slow lazy circles ‘til I thought I was gonna cry or pass out or something.

“Uh 16, 17 years, something like that,” I said too fucking turned on to lie with her trailing kisses up my cock.

“Does he even know you’re in witness protection?” she asked holding my dick in front of her open mouth.

“Fuck if I know,” I hissed as she swallowed me down down down until there was lipstick in my pubes and I was already coming.


	5. The Rabbit Hole, and What Ringo Found There.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ringo discovers he knows less about himself than he thought.

So we went to Nebraska.  
Which was weird. I mean Genie stood out, the way a really hot chick does. In Saltville it was like leading a fucking pink unicorn through town. Like, she couldn’t set foot in a 7-11 without getting eyeball fucked by every guy in the joint.

And then we came to the farm. I half expected it to be gone. Turned into a shopping mall or the house bulldozed or …just gone, but it was still there. My dad’s blue pick up was still there, the same pick up I learned to drive in the 6th grade because my feet could reach the pedals.

I sat in the driveway with Genie for a minute before I could bring myself to open the door.

“We shoulda called,” I said.

Genie gave me a look “Yeah, every time you tried that you freaked out.”

“Maybe we oughta go home,” I said.

“Uh no,” Genie said “I didn’t drive all day to turn around and drive back. Anyway you owe me pie.”

“We can go to Dennys,” I said “ ‘Sides I believe I did most of the driving.”

“Richie,” Genie said in that tone that meant she had had enough of my shit.

Sometimes Genie was an immovable fucking object. It looked like this was one of those times. I had no choice but to follow her to the door.

She knocked at the door, I stood behind her. It seemed safer.  
Then, there he was, my dad.

I don’t know what I expected. Maybe I thought he’d yell at me. But that wasn’t what happened, instead he opened the door and he hugged both of us.  
That made three, three hugs from my dad.

I looked around for my grandma, wondering if she was dead, maybe. I didn’t see her anywhere.

I wasn’t sure how it worked but my dad didn’t seem any older than he did 16 years ago.

 

“Hi, Dad, uh this is my girlfriend, Genie,” not exactly a phrase I ever imagined myself saying, but there you go “Is Grandma…?”

“Your grandma’s over at your Aunt Carol’s. I was invited I just couldn’t take your Uncle Carl for that long,” my dad said “They brought me plenty of food, though.”

 

Carl was a massive asshole. I never thought my dad noticed.  
In the end it was kinda freaky how normal it was. There was dry turkey, and gluey mashed potatoes but the pie was pretty good.  
Considering half the favorite family stories were about bloodthirsty Indian attacks my dad was cool to Genie. Either way based on my life as a Langly, we had it coming.

My dad wasn’t real talkative, but then he wasn’t a talkative guy. Still he seemed glad we were there. 

Then when we couldn’t eat anymore my dad said what he always said “I could use your help in the barn.”

It could have been 1979, or 1980, or 1981, 82, 83, 84. Life didn’t change a whole bunch on the farm. Cows don’t observe holidays, federally recognized or not.

What the hell, I’d play along. I only had 5 or 600 things I wanted to say to him, preferably without an audience. Even if that audience was Genie.

“Pass me that feed will ya?” my dad said as soon as we were in the barn.

Fuck, the bags had gotten heavier over the last 16 years.

“You know,” I said turning to stare at the corrugated metal wall “ I feel pretty dumb for takin’ so long to realize it, but you were a pretty good dad.”

“I was a sorry dad,” he said on the other said of the barn, about as far away from me as he could get.

“No, you weren’t,” I said. It was dumb and it was familiar. It didn’t really matter what we were arguing about, it was our same old pattern.

“That why you haven’t been home in 17 years?” he asked.

“16,” I said “16 and a half on the outside.”

“I tried like hell, Ringo, I really did,” my dad said.

“It’s not your fault, man, not all of it, anyway,” I said to the wall and the cows. It’s funny how your parents always seem like these omnipotent, omniscient beings when the truth is they’re just scared kids same as you. At the time I thought of my dad as a grown up, large and in charge. He was all of 18 when I was born. He was a 23 year old kid when my mom cut out and left him with a five year old who musta seemed like he was from outer space.  
I had nothin’ but sympathy for him.

Across the barn my dad shook his head and made a noise I figured was a laugh.

“I’ve just got one question for ya, just one,” I said, wishin’ I had worn my coat out to the barn.

“Yeah?” my dad said.

“What the hell were you thinking? I mean, either one of ya? What was goin’ through your head?” I said.

 

“Your mom was scared,” my dad said somewhere on the other side of the barn, he had disappeared behind a cow or some hay or some shit because I couldn’t see him anyplace, only hear him.

“What was she scared for? I don’t get it,” I asked because, well it wasn’t like my dad, and it wasn’t a real answer.

“I shoulda told you a long time ago but I…I thought I might lose you,” here he made that noise again but I was less sure it was a laugh “turns out I lost you anyway.”

This was not like my dad at all. I wanted to shake the guy on the other side of the barn and ask him what he’d done with John Langly.

“You didn’t lose me, man, I’m right here, I’m sorry,” I said worrying and starting to ramble “Man, I’m sorry for bein’ a shitty son. I’m gonna keep in touch, I’m gonna…”

“Shaddup, Ringo!” my dad yelled like he only did when he was getting really pissed.

And I shut up, because that was how it worked. We had a very set routine. Generally speaking I pushed and pushed and pushed and every once in a while my dad lost his temper and told me to shut up…and I did.

I’m still not sure why but if my dad was serious and raised his voice I did what he said. I mean it wasn’t like I was afraid of him. He gave me a lot of chores, because he was just one guy and there were a lot of chores to be done, but he never hit me, he never even punished me really…you know aside from the metaphysical horror that is living in rural Nebraska.

Neither of us said anything for a long time. If I hadn’t been standing by the door I would have suspected he slipped out it was quiet for so long.

“You weren’t mine to lose,” my dad said.

Apparently it was talking in riddles day “What do you mean?” There was only one thing it could mean…but that couldn’t be right. 

He didn’t answer. I waited. Then I waited some more but nothing.

“Bullshit, Dad, you can’t say something like that and walk away. It’s not….it’s not…it’s not okay,” I said.  
There went that noise again, whatever it was, I didn’t want to know if he wasn’t laughing “She already had you when I met her. I mean, she hadn’t had you yet but she was gonna.”

I didn’t say a word, I didn’t know what to say, it didn’t matter, my dad went on.

“She was in trouble, in trouble with the law. Her and that…” I could hear the sound of him struggling for a word “S.O.B. she was with before me, they blew up a munitions factory outside Denver. He told her they’d both be better off if they split up. First time I saw her she was hitch hiking, out in the middle of damn nowhere…out on 480. All by herself.”

The story didn’t add up. I knew exactly what he was talking about. I probably know more about the history of radical action in the 1960s and 70’s than anyone who wasn’t there, maybe more than some who were zonked out of their gourds, and there was no Cathy Sims mentioned anywhere. Cathy Sims, that was my mom’s name, even though the only reason I knew that was from my birth certificate. I mean, sure, I knew about the bombing he was talking about. December 1968. All the participants would later be identified as Weathermen. Cathy Sims was not a Weatherman. Cathy Sims’ only traces were a birth certificate in Chicago, a marriage license to John Paul Langly, another birth certificate for a baby boy born in Saltville in 1969, and a death certificate in Chicago ten years later. And a couple of arrests for solicitation in the 70’s that I would take with me to my grave.

“My mom wasn’t involved in politics,” I said.

There was that noise again “Ringo, you don’t know…”

“I know plenty,” I said, ready to argue, I didn’t want any of this to be true. When I was 20 it would have been a kind of wet dream that my “real” parents were 60’s radicals, but now all I wanted was the boring asshole who raised me.

“Ringo, you don’t even know her real name. Sims was an ID she bought off a girl she met when she was hitchhiking,” my dad said and suddenly every argument I had stopped cold “Her name was Heidi, Heidi Weiss. Your…her fella was named Michael Leif.”

Those were names I did know.

Michael Leif. He’d been a wet behind the ears grad student when he joined the Weathermen. A Ph.d. candidate in South American studies when he was arrested for the Denver bombings. He did 20 years in Leavenworth down the cell block from Peltier. Heidi Weiss was an undergrad. I couldn’t remember her major off the top of my head. English. She had something to do with the Evergreen Review if I remembered it right. Both of them were from Reed. Heidi was never found although there were rumors every few years. Heidi Weiss was tricky. I knew their stories but I couldn’t have picked either one of them out of a police line up. I knew a lot of people’s stories, just not my own, apparently.

I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“She didn’t fool me, Ringo. She told me straight out she was… she was gonna have you. I knew what I was signin’ up for,” he said “That was half the reason I...Ringo, I was headed to Lincoln ‘cause my number was up. All I had to do was show the draft board the marriage license and a note from a doctor in Lincoln sayin’ she was, she was gonna have you and they let me go.” 

“Did you know she was gonna dump me on ya?” I asked, because that was what happened. I wasn’t even his kid, she dumped me on him, and he broke his back trying to take care of me.

“Your mother was scared, Ringo. Scared every day the FBI were gonna come and you were gonna wind up taken away. She was more scared of somebody takin’ you away than she was of bein’ arrested,” my dad said somewhere across the barn “She figured if she was gone, if she got caught some place else at least you’d have a home with me.”

Shit, when I came to Nebraska I had one story and now I had a history I didn’t even recognize even though I knew all the names by heart.

When I got to Nebraska my dad was, you know, an okay dad who wasn’t perfect but at least he loved me. The more I heard the more he looked like he was fucking father of the year.

But what was I supposed to say? Fuck that other guy, I love you, dad? Was that the right thing? My dad never said “I love you” to me once in his life. He wasn’t that kind of guy.

I turned away from the wall.

It occurred to me my dad had hugged me three times in my life. I’d never hugged him.

So I walked over to the other side of the barn, where he was leaning against the wall, pretty much the same as I’d been, and I put my arms around him. I wasn’t sure if he’d let me.

He let me, and he squeezed me back, hard.

“You’re my fuckin’ hero, Man,” I said or maybe it was more of a whisper, but I knew he heard me because he squeezed harder.

“Is it okay if I come back?” I asked, letting him go. 

“In another 17 years?” he asked.

“Are you gonna keep bustin’ my ass about that?” I asked, maybe I rolled my eyes.

“How ‘bout Christmas?” he said.

I shook my head “Genie’s got family and we already agreed. How about Spring Break if you don’t make me spend the whole time fuckin’ with your god damn cows?”

“It’s a farm, Ringo, chores gotta be done,” he said.

“Yeah, yeah, I know, the cows don’t know it’s Christmas,” I said like we hadn’t had this argument maybe a hundred times before.

And then my dad laughed. Really laughed. Not whatever it was he was doing before and I laughed too, because…fuck some things never change, and that could be a good thing.

“Hey, man…thanks,” I said and I meant it.

“What for?” like he really didn’t know what I was grateful for.

“For takin’ care of me, especially since, you know, you didn’t have to,” I said, unwilling to belabor the point that I wasn’t his real kid.

“I don’t know what I woulda done when your mama left if I didn’t have you to take care of,” my dad said, like it was obvious.

It was the first time in my life he’d ever said anything about his feelings and he said he was glad for me, in not so many words.

I wanted to hug him again but we’d both probably had all we could take of that.

While I was trying to figure out what to do my dad held up a crumpled envelope.

“That S.O.B. sent her a letter after you were born. You oughta have it,” he said.

“What’s it say?” I asked.

“I don’t read other people’s mail, Ringo,” my dad said sternly, like I was a kid. But if he said he hadn’t read it, you could bet money he hadn’t. He was like that.

 

~~  
I had Genie read me the letter as we headed home. I couldn’t make myself do it.

“Heidi, you treacherous…I don’t know this word,” Genie said.

“Spell it,” I said. 

“B.o.u.r.g.e.o.i.s.” Genie spelled.

“Bourgeois, it’s means, like uptight middle class,” I said taking a sip of my big gulp.

“Okay-“ Genie cleared her throat and started again “Heidi, you treacherous bourgeois whore. Or should it be Mrs. Langly?”

“Go on,” I said the car rolling down the empty flat nothing that was the Midwestern highway system.

“I cannot believe you have the temerity, the sheer fucking gall, to send me a message in federal prison to inform me you have named my son after the fucking Beatles like some goddamn teenybopper,” Genie said “But now that you have gone over to the side mediocre mundanity…is that right? Mundanity?”

“I think so…go on,” I said thinking I saw the Kansas border in the distance.

“But now that you have gone over to the side of mediocre mundanity that is the Midwest what can I expect from you but mainstream drivel. It will be nothing but God, Mom, the Beatles and apple pie for little Heidi from here on out. You fucking cunt, you were informed by me and reminded by the associates through whom our letters pass, if the kid was a boy the name was either Che or Eldridge, one of those. I don’t care what you think will be “easier” for the kid, in a revolution even children must serve a useful purposes,” Genie took a breath and took a sip of my big gulp. 

“What else does he say?” I asked.

“In other countries grade school children take up arms against the Imperialist forces, the least you could do is name the kid for one of our fucking allies instead of some rich capitalist pig,” Genie read. 

“Jesus,” I said “What a fucking asshole. What else?”

“You can send your apology via Bill’s grocer. What does that mean?” Genie asked “Is that some kind of code?”

I shook my head “Naw, I think, Bill Kuntsler,” I stopped and inhaled “I know his lawyer was this dude, Bill Kunstler. He represented a lot of revolutionaries back in the day, the FBI, the CIA, all those motherfuckers had wiretaps on his ass, opened his mail, but the deal was he was represented all the biggies and plenty of others, too. And because he had due cause, being their lawyer, to visit all these big time, heavy hitting dudes he could pass information, if only he could get it. So eventually he set it up so his corner grocery store guy got any special mail for people he represented.”

Genie breathed out deep breath “This is crazy, you’re dad seems like kind of a dick, but…”

I shook my head again “Not my dad, Genie, my dad’s John Langly, this guy’s a sperm donor at the most.”

“Anyway…I was saying I know who Bill Kunstler is,” Genie said and it kinda surprised me, I mean, not like I thought she was dumb, but recent history wasn’t usually her kind of thing. Not like she didn’t care, but like, it pissed her off too much to dwell on. “My folks were at Wounded Knee. Kuntsler was my dad’s lawyer, too,” she said “They didn’t charge my mom. I think because she was pregnant with me. I think that’s why anyway.My mom got pregnant with me when they were there.”

It was a weird connection, a coincidence, too fucking tenuous to be anything but what is commonly known as FM, fucking magic. Long long ago, in a galaxy far far away, a galaxy commonly known as Takoma Party, Maryland, I would have called myself a sucker for even entertaining the thought, but it seemed to me like maybe it was fate, or you know a sign from the gods of love and chaos. Me and Genie, we were meant to be, like fated by the magical powers of one of the most righteous attorneys on the planet. I didn’t say it to Genie in case she might laugh at me. 

“Want me to read the rest of it? That’s almost everything,” Genie said.

“Might as well finish it,” I said.

“I hate this place. I hate the food. I hate the asshole guards. Most of all I hate the boredom. Nothing is worse than the boredom of incarceration. Nothing. Viva La Revolution. Mike. Post Script. I have no idea when they are going to let me out of solitary. The only living soul I’m allowed to see is my attorney. You know it’s bad when Bill’s ugly mugg starts looking good. I swear, next time I see him I am going to kiss that son of a bitch on the mouth and pretend he’s you. And there are all these little drawings on the bottom of the page,” Genie said.

“Like what? Like schematics or somethin’?” I asked.

“Like cartoons,” Genie said.

I pulled the car to the shoulder “Hand it over,” I said.

On the fragile old piece of, it looked like newsprint, was a crazy little cartoon in ballpoint pen. There were naked chicks dancing in a circle around a skinny naked dude with a big honking nose who held a naked baby boy over his head. The baby boy, presumably your truly, was pissing in a long stream onto the head then sitting president Richard Nixon.  
The skinny dude had a speech balloon that said “I hereby re-name you Eldridge Ernesto Amiri Baraka Vladimir Illich Agamemnon Ike&Tina Turner Captain Beefhart Buckminster Fuller Leif- cast off the shackles of your slave name, son!”

In the corner a fully dressed blonde girl was bent over a typewriter while a cow sat on her head and some guy with a suspicious resemblance to Bill Kunstler smoked a huge fat joint.

I leaned forward and carefully folded at the point where the letter ended and the cartoon began, then just as carefully I tore along the fold, crumpled up the crazy whining bitching letter and threw it out onto the plains. The cartoon I put inside the glove compartment.

I pushed up my glasses and reached into the back seat for my laptop “I wanna check this guy out.”

 

~~  
The feeling that came over me again as I hacked and cracked my way through Michael Leif’s life was comfortingly familiar. I was on a mission, uncovering a story. It hardly mattered that the story was me. 

It turned out the guy, Michael Leif, my mom’s old boyfriend, I couldn’t call him my dad, my dad was John Langly, as part of his terms of parole he stayed in Kansas once he was released from Leavenworth. 

He lived in Lawrence, easily the most liberal town in Kansas. Which also happened to be on our way home. More or less. The house was easy to find.

“Don’t let on about the witness protection, hacking, or the newspaper or anything like that. I don’t know this guy. I don’t know if he’s trustworthy,” I told Genie as we walked up the sidewalk.

“You’re the one who goes around talking about that shit, I’ve never told anybody, ever,” Genie said, sounding a little indignant but reaching out to hold my hand “Do you think I’m stupid? You think I’m stupid, don’t you?” 

“Jesus, Genie, why you gotta be so touchy?” I said squeezing her little fingers. I was nervous

“I dunno, Richie, why you gotta be so fucking con-de-scending?” Genie said squeezing back.

“Part of my charm, I guess,” I said pulling her along with me. 

Like I said the guy’s house was easy to find, the trouble was getting him to open the damn door.

 

I could see him, or somebody, movin’ around in there, ignorin’ me no matter how hard I knocked. I was torn between yellin’ who I was at the top of my lungs and bustin’ down the damn door. Too bad there were 12 locks on the door.

“It’s Ringo!” I shouted with my face practically up against the door jamb “Heidi’s kid! Your kid! Eldridge Ernesto! Open the damn door already!”

Genie was being uncharacteristically quiet, usually she has an opinion about everything and isn’t shy about sharing.

I must have said the magic word because ABRACADRABRA the locks started turning one by one.

Dude opened the door with two chains still in place.

“Ringo’s dead,” Dude said.

He was ugly as fuck, with no lips and a big old hooked nose. Instead of a forehead what this dude had was a five or a six. No way was I not his crotchfruit.

“Yeah, well, rumors of my death might have been a little exaggerated,” I admitted. This was not going the way I planned. How the fuck did dude even know I was supposed to be dead?

Meanwhile Dude was reading me, head to toe, like I was the fucking Rosetta Stone.

“You cointelpro?” he asked, eyes squinted.

“Fuck no,” I answered laughing at the sheer fucking ridiculousness of the question.

“You on the lam?” he asked.

Fuck. I wasn’t sure what to say to that one.

“Sorta, okay, yeah,” I said.

“Who’s the chick?” Dude asked.

“My fiance,” I said without thinking. I mean I figured after I finished my dissertation we might…yeah. Provided I could work up the cojones to ask her.

“Richie?” Genie said eyes wide, yanking on my arm like I was Mr. Fantastic.

“Sorry, not good enough,” Dude said starting to close the door but I reached inside with my left arm, so he couldn’t.

“Her old man was at Wounded Knee. You guys had the same lawyer,” I thinking of anything I could say that would convince him to let us in.

On my right side I still had ahold of Genie’s hand but she was freaking the fuck out.

“Richie, let’s get out of here, this guy doesn’t want to talk to you,” she said.

And like that Dude shoved me out the door, but not before pushing a slip of paper into my fist.

On pure reflex I let go of Genie, rather than land on her, and like that I was flat on my ass on Dude’s porch.

The note said COME BACK AFTER DARK- USE THE REAR ENTRANCE NEXT TIME.

Genie stood there with her little arms folded across her chest, glaring down at me. I handed her the note but she didn’t say a word, just stuffed it in her pocket.

“Don’t you think you ought to at least fuckin’ ask me before you go around telling people we’re getting married? That’s what that word means; fiancé. It means you’re getting married,” she said, her little hands clenched into fists.

“Shit. What do you want me to say ‘Hey, Euglena, I’d like to be stuck with your bitchy anal retentive ass for keeps, how ‘bout it?’ It would totally suck if you said no,” but Genie didn’t say a word just kept staring so I took a deep breath and put it all out there “How ‘bout it? I wanna marry you. Wanna marry me?” I asked still sitting on the ground, staring at my shoes.

“When?” Genie asked “I don’t wanna be one of those dumb bitches who’s ‘engaged’ for three years then breaks up and gets ‘engaged’ to someone else. Fuck that. Give me a date.”

“No pressure or anything,” I said, because shit, I hadn’t even meant to, you know, mention it, not until after my dissertation. One thing at a fucking time, okay? But, shit, now that the cat was out of the bag… why the hell not? This was it. Genie kept me from totally falling apart and I would be a moron to let her get away. Also she was so out of my league it wasn’t even funny. There was no way that kind of lightning was going to strike twice for me. Plus, I liked her. Really fuckin’ liked her.

Genie gave me a cold hard stare. 

“Either you mean it or you don’t. Give me a date or take it back. Put up or shut up, asshole,” she said.

“It’s the Friday after Thanksgiving. If the courthouse is open I’ll do it right now. Does today work for you?” I said. Might as well get it over with. I wasn’t real hot on the “getting” married aspect of the deal; the being married was more what I had in mind. 

“Well, we gotta get rings first, either way,” Genie said while I pulled myself up off the ground.

“A ring. I’m not really a jewelry kinda guy,” I said. It was true, I wasn’t.

“Uh uh, Richie. I wear a ring, you wear a ring. You gotta be marked off from the rest of the herd. Consider yourself lucky I don’t put a brand on your skinny white ass,” she said.

That was real cool of her; one of the nicest things anybody ever said to me. She was the only person other than John Langly to ever claim me. I guess I could get used to a ring for that.

So we did it. Took up the rest of the day and kept me from getting antsy waiting to go back and see …my mom’s old boyfriend.

Genie picked out two plain silver rings at a headshop. Although it was a tedious fucking pain in the ass trying to find one small enough for her and then another that was big enough for me we managed. While I was finding my ring Genie found a used Rammenstein CD for 99 cents. Score.   
Then we went to the courthouse and filled out the paperwork.  
Two hours later we stood in front of the judge and said the words.  
I Do. I Do.  
The judge said the words; Blah Blah Blah Husband and Wife.  
Blah. Blah. Blah.  
Kiss the Bride.   
Better than the kind of tedious crap judges usually said to me but I was a little uncomfortable, I’d never kissed Genie in front of anyone before but it was cool, I did it. I managed.   
And it was done.   
And it was real.  
And she was wearin’ my Ramones t-shirt.  
And I managed to make it through without puking from nerves.  
Sometimes the less time I have to think about things the better.   
Then we had pizza and went back to Dude’s house.

As directed we came in the back way.  
Dude opened the door before we could even knock.  
The first thing he said was “What’s with the rings?”  
I shrugged “I told you she was my fiancé. Isn’t that what you do with fiancés? Marry ‘em? We got married, duh.”  
Dude just squinted at me through his coke bottle glasses. Face to face his shoulders were stooped and he was so white he looked like a damn pilot fish.  
“So, how’d you hear about me bein’ dead?” I asked.  
“I’ve got my sources. Besides, I’m a subscriber,” dude said “Not under my real name, of course, that would be a violation of my terms of parole. I have it sent to the old lady next door then I pay a kid to steal it off her porch.”  
Fuck. Unless my eyes deceived me there was a copy of the Magic Bullet taped to the fridge.   
“Fuckin’ unconstitutional fascist bastards,” I said, but my heart wasn’t in it.  
“Truer words, man, Truer words,” dude said.  
“So,” I said staring at him, not wanting to ask the question I came there to ask.  
Eugenia hadn’t said a fucking word since we stepped foot in the place. Taking in our surroundings I realized why; it was like the inside of a tunnel or a coal mine, or maybe a WWI trench. There were stacks and stacks of books and newspapers and old vinyl records lining the walls. The kitchen table overflowed with paper piled almost to the ceiling. There were pizza boxes everywhere.

I didn’t have to imagine where I would be without Eugenia, I was seeing it first hand. Marrying her had been a brilliant move. I hoped she wasn’t looking around regretting hitching her wagon to my fucked-up star.

“So?”dude said back.

“I heard we might be related,” I said.  
Dude kinda curled the corner of his no-lip and shrugged “That’s the rumor.”  
“You did 20 years in Leavenworth?” I asked.  
“22, not counting time spent awaiting trial,” he said.  
“So you got out in, what? 92?” I asked.  
“The warden and I parted company in 1995,” he said.  
It was impressive, in a kind of terrible, fucking backwards ass way, that he could hoard so much crap in 7 years. Also, holy shit! The guy had been locked up most of my life.  
“How long you been reading my paper?” I asked. It was the only thing I could think to say. I wanted to either love the guy or hate the guy but he was making it hard to choose which.  
“Since 91,” he said, I would say the guy was twitching a little but everything about the guy was one twitch after another.  
“How?” I asked.  
He waved his hand like there was a fly loose in the kitchen “Heidi sent it to me. She’s always sending me shit about you.”  
“My mom died in 1979,” I said.  
Dude shook his head absentmindedly “Naw man, that’s just more of Heidi Weiss’s fucking mind games, like when she told me she was gonna leave you with that fucking farmer ‘cause I threatened to roll over on her before sentencing.”   
“What?” I said. Fuck fuck fuck. I guess Mike Leif had decided I was gonna hate him.  
“Well, I didn’t do it, did I?” Dude practically yelled in my face “The offer was made and it was tempting. Brought me into the judge’s chambers and there I sat with Bill on one side and the pasty-faced prosecutor on the other and they said for every weatherman I turned in they’d wipe five years off my sentence. Trouble was the only one I had to squeal on was Heidi. I told her I was gonna do it, too, but I just talkin’ shit. I was so pissed off, she had Bill bring me your report card and it had that fuckin’ farmer’s name on it.’ You and Mr. Langly must be so proud of little Ringo,’ ”Dude said in a creepy sarcastic voice and then his face fell to a snarl and he ran his hands through his long scraggly hair “I fuckin’ sat there with Bill after they made the offer. I knew what would have happened. We went over it and over it and I did my time, I did it like a man. I did it to protect you and that fuckin’ bitch. Christ, I was so in love with that faithless fucking whore.”  
“She thought you meant it,” I said.  
“Bullshit,” Dude said drawing the word out long.  
“She thought you were gonna turn her in and I was gonna wind up a ward of the state, so she ran off and left me with the best dad she could find under the circumstances,” I said.  
Dude went still for a moment, then he sort of shook, like a wet chicken, and pretended, just like that, he hadn’t heard what I said.  
“Heidi’s not dead. I can tell you that much,” he said and went to the fridge. It was covered, top to bottom, with articles from the Magic Bullet, old report cards, even a photocopy of a college newspaper article about some dumb shit at my math department when I was an undergrad. With a picture. I was not an attractive kid. That and I was clearly way younger than everyone else in the picture. Somewhere in the back of my head a song was playing – One of these things is not like the others. It could be my theme song.  
Even with Byers and Fro’, they had real lives, were regular guys in their own weird ways, with families and old girlfriends and histories. All my life I felt like an alien that John Langly found on the back 40 one day in July. Too high strung and weird for serious attachment. I was alone in the world. Only I wasn’t, not really, I had a mom who loved me enough to leave me in order to keep me safe, and a dad who was willing to take care of his little space man, regardless of where he fucking came from, and another guy- not a real dad exactly- but a guy who went to prison himself rather than see me yanked away from the only home I knew. None of ‘em were perfect, not by a long shot, but they fucking loved me, in demonstrable, material ways and I didn’t even fucking know. What a tool.  
I couldn’t quite lay my finger on it but somehow my whole life started to change the night Genie fell off my lap.   
Genie meanwhile had her attention plastered to the fridge that apparently did double duty as a shrine to yours truly.   
I hoped she didn’t make fun of what she saw there.  
Dude kept rummaging.  
“Here you go, birthday card,” Dude said waving the card in the air before handing it my way.  
It just a generic card with a slanty “many happy returns of the day, love Heidi” written inside. The funny part was the date, July 16, 2002.  
“Your birthday July 16, too?” I asked.  
Dude rolled his eyes “Jesus, you lucked out growin’ up without that headcase. Bitch sends me a card, every year, on your birthday, not mine.”  
“This is dated 2002, it’s 2003,” I said. Michael Leif was crazy and he was an asshole and he seemed, in his own very fucked up way, to care about me. What was I supposed to do with all that?  
“Yeah, man, she didn’t send me her yearly passive aggressive Hallmark torment because you’re dead,” Dude said “died saving Washington D.C. from a biological weapon according to Ms. Weiss. Called me up, for the first time since I went to the pen, bawling her eyes out. I asked her why she didn’t call her “man of the soil” to commiserate, she said she didn’t deserve to talk to him. Didn’t deserve him, never deserved him. I on the other hand, was exactly what she had coming. Such a bitch, man, she can emote all over the damn place and cut you to the quick at the same time. It’s like emotional napalm.”  
At that moment it didn’t matter how much shit dude talked about her, my mom was alive. My chest felt tight and it was getting hard to breathe.  
“Do you have any idea where she is?”I asked.  
Dude shrugged “Heidi could have been a fucking intelligence operative if she’d swung that way. It’s impossible to find Heidi if Heidi doesn’t want to be found. But,” he said pausing dramatically.  
“But what?” I said grabbing dude by the shirt without meaning to.  
“I’m pretty sure her sister knows where she is,” dude said.  
“Her sister?”I asked letting him go.  
“Yeah, Heidi’s sister Clara still lives in L.A. You can look her up, Dr. Clara Goldstein. The enemy Goldstein as I prefer to call her. But I’d be careful; she’s a shrink,” Dude said. 

~~  
Walking to the car in the dark I didn’t say a word but Genie turned to me.

“You’re nothin’ like him,” she said.

It was a bald-faced lie but it felt good to hear anyway. Maybe it was her way of saying she wouldn’t let me be like him. That I believed, Genie had no tolerance for bullshit.

I didn’t know what to say so I kissed her thumb. 

“Richie, did you really break into the Pentagon?” she asked.

“Which time?” I asked.

“Fuck, Richie,” Genie laughed, but it had been an honest question on my part.

“Man, that’s the best suggestion I’ve heard all day,” I said. 

There in the dark Genie pulled me to her, her mouth on mine, and kissed me until we both had to come up for air.

The first thing I did once I got in the car was hack us a room at the Quality Inn.

~~

We’d been, you know, having sex for a little less than a month at that point but this was different than it had ever been before.

Every time before I’d been too worried about disappointing Genie to stop thinking about what I was doing long enough to enjoy it. Okay, maybe that’s not exactly right, I enjoyed it plenty. But I was still, you know, a partitioned hard drive. Up until the final second some part of my brain was running an internal catalogue of what I should and shouldn’t be doing. This time wasn’t like that. I picked Genie up and carried her into the room, ‘cause I was supposed to and not a lot of stuff makes me feel macho but Genie practically being a midget and all it was pretty easy to you know, carry her in and lay her down on the bed. If I felt all testosterone-y and turned on about it, I’m only human, so sue me.

Genie put her arms around my neck and kissed me. Her tongue in my mouth, her hands in my hair. My hands went under her shirt, over the bra, kissing her mouth and squeezing her tits. I wanted her so bad I didn’t even bother taking off her bra, I just pulled it down enough to get to her bare tits. The only time she stopped running her hands through my hair was when she unbuttoned her jeans and started wiggling out of them, her tits shaking with every shimmy.

I can take a hint. I slid my left hand down her ribs, over her belly, and between her legs. She was just starting to get wet so I teased her clit with one finger as I sucked her tit into my mouth. Barely touching her the way I figured out made her want more and more. Fuck that felt good. I sucked hard and Genie groaned. The harder I sucked the wetter she got. I slid one, two fingers inside her, circling her clit with my thumb. I sucked her tit the way I always wanted to but had been too worried and distracted to do before, taking all I could into my mouth. I was so fucking unbearably hard I had no fucking choice but to thrust against her leg. She didn’t care, she was coming, shaking, stuttering my name.

Sometimes I get carried away by the moment. This is goes for every aspect of my life. John Byers I am not.

I let her tit out of my mouth with a big wet “pop”. The other one was pointing up round and juicy with her nipple so hard it looked like a fuckin’ dome on the Kremlin. I pushed them together and sucked both at once.

“Fuck, Richie,” she said still shaking.

“Genie, I wanna do somethin’ dangerous, somethin’ crazy,” I said.

Genie nodded, she knew what I wanted, seemed like she always knew, but I had to say it just the same.

“Genie?” I asked.

“Yeah, Richie?” she said.

“Wanna go bareback?” I asked “Just like, this one time?” 

“What if I get pregnant?” she said. Every other time I’d worn a rubber and given Genie a lecture on unplanned pregnancies.

“Then you can have a baby. If you wanna,” I said spelling it out for her despite the way the blood was screaming in my ears “Wanna have my baby, Genie?”

“You mean it, Richie?” Genie said her spine as arched and tense as a bow string. She was acting like I’d just said the hottest, dirtiest thing ever to her and maybe I had. Her mouth was open and she was breathing hard. She was so pretty, prettier than girls were supposed to be in real life. I took her face in my hands and I kissed her. Something about Genie’s mouth was...fuck I’d only kissed a couple of girls before Genie but kissing Genie was like sucking on a ripe peach still hot from the sun. Kissing Genie could make me forget about everything else in the world.

“Give me a baby, Richie,” she whispered in my ear.

I nodded then proceeded to fumble undoing the buttons on my jeans but I didn’t have any trouble connecting my dick with her wet wet pussy. It made sense, it just made sense, man, in that beautiful fuckin’ way like calculus or a smooth fuckin’ flawless hack. Unimpeded cock and cunt were elegant. Logical. The viscous wetness inside her all smooth and slick at the same time the muscles of her pussy were squeezing my cock like a fist.

Now she was holding my face between her hands and her tongue was in my mouth completing the circuit. I’d never felt anything more perfect in my life. It was so wet, so fucking perfect. It felt like sex was the one thing evolution got right for homo sapiens sapiens. There was no way this could possibly feel any better. I loved the way her mouth tasted and the way her sweat smelled. Everything about Genie was in-fucking-humanly desirable. Intoxicating. Delicious. Gorgeous.   
It lasted somewhere between 4 minutes and infinity. I came so hard I was afraid for a second I was gonna pass out. 

I woke up the next morning with sunlight streaming through the hotel windows, wearing nothin’ with my jeans balled up on the floor beside the bed and my t-shirt thrown across the back of a chair and Genie hollering at me from the bathroom.

“Bring me a tampon from my purse, will ya, Richie?” she called.

I was partly relieved, partly let down, but that was cool. It was probably smart to wait until after I’d dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s on my dissertation to knock Genie up. But for the first time in my life it seemed like something I could do, have the things that other guys had. Do the things other guys did.


	6. Out The Other Side

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes solving a mystery only makes things more complicated.

When we got back to the land that fun forgot that Saturday the first thing we had to do was go see Jimmy and the girls.

As usual I stood outside in the yard while Euglena went in to break the news. Jimmy was friendly with me and all but in the months me and Genie had been living together he’d never once invited me inside. I guess as far as Jimmy was concerned I was an outside pet.

When I thought about marrying Genie I hadn’t really taken the whole two bratty stepkids into consideration. Sitting on the porch waiting to find out exactly how Jimmy and the girls took the whole thing made me think long and hard about what I’d done.

Kids. Uggg. Girl kids? Even worse.

I mean, the limited exposure I’d had to Paris and Stormy was ...umm okay, I guess but Jesus fuck, what was I supposed to do with a couple of kids? When Genie and I were just friends, helping her get back into her kids’ lives seemed like the right thing to do, but now we were, you know, hitched, it was something else entirely. Paris was like, like, like a middle aged sixth grader and Stormy was like the relentlessly cheerful little...I don’t know what. How the hell was I supposed to handle that? No good deed goes unpunished, I guess.

I was sitting there with my head in my hands feeling sorry for myself when Paris walked out onto the porch with a look on her face like she was this close to kicking me.

“You married my mom,” she said her arms folded across her chest.

“Yeah,” I admitted.

“So you’re a liar,” she said looking down her nose at me.

“No way,” I said wondering what the hell she was talking about.

“You said you weren’t her boyfriend,” she said, like she was accusing me of shoplifting “You said you slept in different bedrooms.”

“I wasn’t, we didn’t, I mean we did, we did sleep in separate rooms,” I said scrambling “Dude, I did not lie to you.”

“How does that work? And don’t call me ‘dude’,” she said.

“When you asked me if I was her boyfriend me and your mom were just friends,” I said breathing out “And then things changed.”

“When? When did things change?” She asked.  
“Halloween,” I said, standing up.

“So, you’re rich, right?” Paris said squinting like she wanted to kill me.

“No, I’m not,” I said “I swear.”

“But you’ve got more money than my dad,” she said.

I shrugged “I dunno, I never asked him for a financial statement.”

“Are you gonna take us away from him?” Paris asked.

I blinked, it was a hell of a thing for her to worry about. I mean, I hadn’t really thought about it but I could see Genie wanting custody but considering all that Jimmy had done for the kids over the years that would be way uncool. I would never go for that.

I shook my head as soon as I realized she was waiting for me to give her an answer.

“You are such a liar. She’s going to tell you that’s what she wants and you are going to take us away from him,” Paris said with her hands on her hips.

“Huh uh, no way, I wouldn’t do that,” I said.

“That’s what you say now,” Paris said with a look of unadulterated contempt.

“That would be uncool,” I said.

Paris just looked at me.

“Seriously, I promise, I won’t try to take you away from Jimmy,” I said.

Paris still didn’t say a word, just stood there with her arms crossed, she was one tough little nut.

I patted the concrete beside me.

She looked at me skeptically “I’m not sitting there, it’s hard and it’s cold and it’s gonna hurt my ass,” she said.

“Oh that’s real nice language,” I said.

“Get over yourself,” Paris said rolling her eyes.

 

“Sit down,” I said sounding to my own ears exactly like John Paul Langly when he told me to “Shaddup, Ringo.”

“Well?” Paris said sitting down next to me, I’d seen more delicate homicide detectives. Seriously, give Paris five minutes alone with Detective Munch and she’d have him bawlin’.

“I’m not gonna take you away from Jimmy,” I said.

“Why should I believe you?” she asked. Which I had to admit was a valid question.

“Because when I was a kid,” I inhaled before I said the next part “When I was a kid the only person I could count on was my stepdad.”

“Why’s that?” Paris asked.

“My uhh, my real dad was in the pen,” I said.

“What for? Like armed robbery or forgery or something? A felony? Or like bad checks or parking tickets?” she asked. Jeez that kid made me nuts.

“He killed two people,” I said, although Mike and Heidi both probably would have argued the semantics of it, that more or less summed up the situation.

“What about you mom?” she asked.

“Huh?” I asked not sure what the question was.

“You said you only had your stepdad,” she asked “Where was your mom?”

“She was kind of an accessory,” I said “She was scared if she got arrested I’d wind up in state custody so she left me with my stepdad.”

“Just like that?” Paris asked.

I nodded “He was all I had. So I guess I figure Jimmy’s earned you two squirts. He can keep ya. Wanna shake on it?” I said extending my hand.

After a second Paris took it, and holding both my hand and my eyes.

“Now I want you to promise you and my mom aren’t going to have any kids of your own,” Paris said with a calculating stare.

“Don’t push your luck, Munchkin,” I said just as the door swung wide and there stood Jimmy.

“Hey, Richie, want to come in and have some pie? My mom loaded us down with leftovers before we left Tulsa,” Jimmy said warily.

It probably went without saying his pie was way better than any we had in Saltville.

~~  
That Sunday before I went back to work I spent three hours on the phone with The Enemy Goldstein. I hated to agree with Mike Leif about anything outside of politics but man, she was a bitch and a half. She put me through the ringer over and over when all I wanted was to get in contact with my mom.

I mean I got it, she was trying to protect her sister. But I was her kid. Wasn’t that supposed to count for somethin’?

I’ve had less invasive body cavity searches.

~What was my childhood like?~  
Chores, cows, more chores, and three channels on the tv.

~No, no, no, emotionally. What was your childhood like emotionally? How was your relationship with your father?~

John Langly was a good dad. He took care of me. A great dad considering he was a 23 year old kid who got dumped with a brat that wasn’t even his.

~So you grew up with the knowledge that John Langly wasn’t your natural father?~

Nah, man, he just told me a coupla days ago.

~That must have been quite a shock.~

Yes, no, maybe. I dunno, maybe, it made a lot of sense.

~In what way?~

I always felt like an alien as a kid.

~Even at school?~

Especially at school.

~Oh, really, how were your grades? Did you struggle academically?~

I had to laugh at that one. Uh no. I did not struggle academically. I skipped a few years and wound up a 15 year old college freshman. Did a 5 year combined bachelors/masters and was accepted as a doctoral candidate before my 20th birthday.

~That sounds like a very socially isolating experience. How are your relationships with women?~

I almost hung up at that point.

~Was your stepmother affectionate?~

My dad never remarried. I think he’s still kinda hung up on my mom.

~You didn’t answer my question, how are your relationships with women? Are you finding it difficult to answer? Is that because you’re gay?~

I couldn’t help myself, I laughed.

Yeah, no.

 

~Why are you laughing?~

Because being gay would have made my whole life easier.

~That’s not something I hear every day. I have a number of clients who would beg to differ.~

Yeah, well, it’s still true.

~Why do you think your life would have been easier if you were homosexual?~

Maybe easier isn’t the right word but it least it would have made a kind of sense. Guys are easier to deal with, that’s for damn sure.

~You have a history of failed relationships, then?~

More laughter. Uhh No.

~I take it from your comments you haven’t had many relationships with women, period.~

She was starting to hit on stuff I didn’t want to talk to anyone about. I had a sudden terror the conversation was going to turn to Genie. No. Just. No. Some things were sacred and Genie was one of them.

I was afraid she would take silence and make it into something so I answered her.

Not a lot.

~Are you currently in a relationship?~

Yup.

~How would you describe your current relationship?~

Best thing that ever happened to me.

At that moment Genie came in to the office to see if I was still alive. She took one look at me laying on the floor with the phone still plastered to my ear.

“Are you still on the phone, Richie? Jesus! What’s she saying?” Genie asked.

I put my hand over the mouthpiece “Blah blah blah,” I told her.

~Is that your girlfriend?~

Wife.  
~Oh really, how long have you been married?~

4 days.

“3 days,” Genie corrected me.

~And you’re spending your honeymoon on the phone with a psychiatrist?~

The Enemy Goldstein was such a bitch.

No, I’m spending it trying to find my mom.

~And that’s not at all Freudian.~

I closed my eyes and tried hard not to scream.

“Gimme that,” Genie said grabbing the phone out of my hand.

“Hello,” Genie said in her fucking Eddie Haskell voice she only ever used, on like authority figures she was trying to get something out of “This is Richie’s wife, Genie,” she said taking the phone with her when she left the room.

Shit. She couldn’t do any worse with Goldstein than I did. Still it wouldn’t be cool to see her turned inside out like I was. It didn’t matter what I wanted, though, because Genie took the phone in the bedroom and locked the door.

I walked to the kitchen and opened a bag of chips, considering my options.

Man, that was a bitch, when it came down to it Genie left me no choice but to sit there with my ear to the door.  
I mean, not that I couldn’t pick the lock. But if I unlocked a door Genie locked…well there was no point since she’d just throw me out as soon as I got in.

So I sat down and got to listening.

This was what I heard.

Laughter followed by the words ~a regular guy, really.~

I wondered who she could be talking about.

~Oh a bar, you know, I was on my own, I’d had a little too much, okay, maybe a little more than alittle. He could tell I wasn’t in any shape to drive.~

There was a long pause.

In a heartbeat. Genie sounded completely serious, just for a second.

I guess The Enemy Goldstein was talking.

~A perfect gentleman. ~More laughter.

~Yeah, a little…sure beats the alternative. ~More laughter.

~Some, sure, but not anything bad. It would be weird if he wasn’t, don’t you think?No, no, they love eachother, you can tell. Different, really really different. Yeah, Richie is so smart about some things but not… everything. No, it creeped him out pretty bad. No, nothing like that guy. Sweet. No, really, the sweetest guy I have ever been involved with and that’s the truth.~

~Guy stuff, oh, you know, video games, computers, music. Anything with a lot of bass. Oh, about normal. Umm yeah. More than average, I’d say. No, not conservative.  
No, no, I wouldn’t go that far in the other direction. Not if it means he has to get off the computer. 7? 7 ½?~

Then laughter.

~Math. Uh University. Is that a thing? Really? Huh. Noooooooooo, Native American. Non-issue. I’m not sure he’s noticed. No, no, none at all.~

And then she laughed more.

~That’s great, thanks. No, go walk your dogs. It’s been great talking to you. Clara.~

I didn’t rate “Clara.”

~Uh huh, Black. 3301 North Lake avenue, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73118~

I was getting my multi-tool out of my pocket just as Genie opened the door.

“So?” I asked “You convince her I was me?”

“She knew you were you, Richie, she just wanted to make sure you weren’t nuts,” Genie said.

 

Like Mike Leif. She didn’t even have to say it.

“What did ya tell her?” I asked, wondering probably for the first time if I was actually crazy. I mean, I’d wondered plenty if something was wrong with me, but it had never occurred to me before that I might be…not right in the head. I always thought of my brain as the one thing I could trust. If I was a few fries short of a Happy Meal Genie was the one who would know. The question was, would she say?

“I told her the truth,” Genie said looking at me like I was stupid “You’re really smart, kinda uptight, but a regular guy.”

“Uptight? Miss-I-let-my-pizza-get-cold-because-The –Watchmen-Are-Out-Of-Chronological-Order told a shrink that I was uptight?”

“Whatever, Richie,” Genie said rolling her eyes “She says she’s sending you a bill for diagnostic services.”

“What?!” fuck that, at least the cops never billed me for the privilege of bein’ violated.

“She’s sending you a bill, and she says you need to make sure to read it very carefully so you don’t miss anything,” Genie said.

“No way,” I said. It sounded like, it sounded entirely possible, Genie had convinced her to give up my mom’s location.

“Way,” Genie said.

“Still not payin’ it, though,” I said, because, shit, that was godawful. Genuinely the least enjoyable phone conversation of my life. Maybe what I needed was an unbiased opinion. That and assurance it was safe to proceed with my plan to contact Heidi Weiss. Luckily I could get both of those from the same person and I hadn’t turned off the loop-line-shunt.

“Gimme the phone,” I said and punched in the number.

“Who you callin’, Richie?” Genie asked.

“Friend of mine at the FBI,” I said.

“Skinner? Or Mulder? Or the other one, Agent Hottie?” Genie asked. She was never going to let that drop, was she?

“Mulder!” I said both to Genie and Mulder at the same time.

“Langly?” he said on the other end of the line, sounded like he had something in his mouth “turn off the tape.”

“Sure thing,” I said even though there wasn’t any tape, and I might not have turned it off even if there was.

“I’m assuming this is not a social call,” Mulder said.

“Naw, man, I just called to shoot the shit and get your granny’s chicken salad recipe,” I said.

“My grandmother bought her chicken salad in a plastic tub,” Mulder chuckled and it was kinda cool to hear a familiar voice, I guess I musta missed him, “What gives?”

“Okay, I got two questions for you,” I said.

“Fire when ready,” Mulder said.

“Am I nuts? I mean, like in all seriousness, in your opinion as a trained shrink, has my gameboard got all its factory pieces?” I asked, because, you know, it was Mulder, and if the cheese had slid off my burger, he wouldn’t be shy about telling me.

Mulder chuckled a little more and then he said “It is my opinion, as a clinical psychologist who has had occasion to observe you in your natural environment much upon these last 14 years that you are what is commonly known as a garden variety neurotic…much like 90% of your fellow Americans. Next question.”

“You know the Weathermen, right?” I asked, treading softly.

“As in, back to Skip with this weekend’s forecast, or as in you don’t need one to know which way the wind blows?” he asked and all the way across the phone lines I could see the change in his expression.

“The second one,” I said.

“Talk to me, Langly,” he said.

“You got any idea how hard the feds are looking for the ones left? The ones that never got caught? Are they close? Do they think they’re close?” I asked.

“Give me a name,” Mulder said.

“Heidi Weiss,” I said, afraid to tell him more. It felt weird not to say she was my mom but I was afraid. I loved the guy but at the end of the day he was a fed. Not that I thought he’d turn my mom in or anything I just…I was conflicted.

“Denver munitions factory bombing, December 24, 1968, killed a security guard and a janitor in the process, though not intentionally. Her boyfriend Michael Leif, aka Leafy Green did 22 years. Co-conspirators Jeffrey Aarnburg and Aaron Silver were picked up on drug charges within 18 months of Leif’s arrest. Of that group only Weiss remains at large,” Mulder said and I both loved and hated the guy’s memory.

“Okay, so you’ll check and see?” I asked.

“Sure thing. Mind telling me why?” Mulder said. I couldn’t blame him for being curious. I’d done a lot of favors for him over the years and none of them without at least asking what a particular piece of information was for. Didn’t mean I always got an answer, though.

“Maybe later,” I said, which was more or less what he told me, not every time but often enough.

“Langly?” he said.

“Yeah, Mulder?” I said, kinda afraid of what was gonna pop out of the guy’s mouth.

“Byers and Frohike are worried sick. Why haven’t you been in contact with them?” Mulder said.

“Jesus Christ you people, nag, nag, nag, bitch, bitch, bitch. I’m teaching remedial fucking math to a bunch of chimps that can barely get a pencil between their toes…plus I’m trying to squeeze 14 years of work into one dissertation by May. I know you mumbo jumbo psychologist types can get by some fucking psychedelic word salad about how your mom didn’t love you enough but I’ve gotta produce a work that’ll stand up to scrutiny from a bunch world class math dicks,” I said panicking. I couldn’t stand the thought of Byers and Fro’ saying anything bad about Genie “Man, I’m busy.”

“Oh is that all?” Mulder said all cheery, like it was nothin’ “Scully’s here, gotta go.”

Click.


	7. The First Step

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The knot comes untangled.

Six days later I was trying to be as good as my word when Euglena came into my office shaking her ass and a DVD box.

“Come on, Richie, take a break before you wind up out on the streets murdering strangers,” she said.

I’d gone too deep down the rabbit hole to speak right away, so I blinked at her. I had that floating feeling you get from too much abstract work for too long. Genie walked over and put her hand on the side of my face, bent at the waist and kissed me. She was wearing…um not her jeans and a t-shirt. Instead she had on this um, top that hung down on one shoulder so I could see her…um…bra strap and a skirt I knew from experience was too short for her to bend over in.

 

Yeah, I could definitely use a break.

“What you got to watch?” I asked, but Genie put the box behind her back. 

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” she said.

“C’mon, Euglena,” I tried to make a grab for it but she squealed.

“Richie! Now you gotta come see,” and she ran. I came to the livingroom to the thump of heavy bass.  
Fuck yes! Repo Man.

“I love this movie! When’d you get it?” I asked plopping down on the couch, not pointing out that I got it three days earlier online. I didn’t want to get a speech about “stealing”.

“About an hour ago. I bet you didn’t even know I was gone,” she laughed.

I shrugged. “So? I know you’re here now,” I said “Wanna uh sit on my lap?”

I’d never said that to her, but I’d thought it a lot. Thought about the difference between August and December. 

“ Maybe in a little bit,” she said and smiled a sort of surprised smile that was a little bit shy, too. 

So I sat down beside her on the couch, same as when we first moved in together. Same as always only not. That weird combination of being turned on and being ashamed was confused, I mean I felt it, the difference was I knew I didn’t have to. It wasn’t, like, necessary. I wanted Genie and, against all odds, she wanted me back. Still I knew I was a pervert and Genie probably wouldn’t appreciate all the dirty things I wanted to do to her, with her, all over her. I had a tough time sorting it all out. For the first time in my life I was part of a couple, I didn’t want to fuck it up when it had barely started.   
Somehow like magic, like she’d been reading my mind, or at least my recent browser history, Genie pivoted swinging her little stocking feet onto my lap.  
“Do you think I need to repaint these or are they okay?” she said wiggling her toes in a way that instantly made my jeans uncomfortable.  
Fuck! She was practically requiring me to look at her feet, more than look at them, hold them, feel them. Trying not to seem too interested or excited I ran my finger over the tips of her toes. I might have shrugged. I meant to shrug, even though a shrug was about the furthest thing from my mind. Genie was perfect, head to toe, as usual. I didn’t need to say that, did I?  
I looked over the tops of my glasses, like reading code, scanning Genie’s polish for even one little chip. If there was one I didin’t see it.  
Next thing I knew Genie’s other foot was rubbing little circles on the croth of my jeans. I went still like somebody hit me with a freezee wray. I looked at Genie and Genie looking at me. She was grinning and her eyes were twinkling. Her little pink tongue shot out and swiped across her lower lip.  
“You like that, Richie?” she asked sounding like she could barely keep from laughing as she rolled the arch of her foot over the place where my cock was tryin’ to bust through my jeans.  
Unfair. It was fucking unfair of her to tease me like that. She didn’t even slow down, just kept rubbing that perfect little foot against my hard-on with me so turned on I had trouble thinking straight.  
“I asked you if you liked that?” Genie said running her toes down my cheek.  
All I could manage to get out was a strangled “uhhhhhh.”  
“Seems like you like it okay,” Genie said still rubbing against my hard dick.  
I felt like I was gonna pass out.  
She couldn’t possibly mean what she was doing, it had to be a trick.  
It was all I could do to keep breathing, her stocking foot was so silky.   
All on its own my hand started stroking the delicate arch. I don’t know how but her little toes found their way into my mouth. I couldn’t help myself, I was covering her foot with kisses.   
This could not be happening. This could not be real. I closed my eyes to keep the fantasy going.  
“You gotta tell me stuff, Richie,” she said.  
“Like what?” I said running my tongue over her pinky toe.  
“Like if you wanna do somethin’ kinda different,” she said rubbing her other foot harder against my crotch “You gotta tell me. I mean, what’s the worst that could happen?”  
“Ea...Ea...Easy for you to say,” I said struggling to speak with all my blood in my dick and none of it in my brain“Wha...wha...what if I tell you what I want and you think I’m some kinda pervert?”  
”The worst that can happen is I say ‘No’,” Genie said.  
I didn’t have an answer for that.  
Genie sat up, both her feet still in my lap.  
“Look, Richie, I don’t wanna be hurt, or humiliated, or tied up. I’ve had enough of that shit to last me a lifetime but other than that, just ask, I’ll probably say ‘Yes’,”   
It was scary to think about her saying “no”. Without wanting to I’d gone back to rubbing the tops of her feet.  
“I know you ain’t been lookin’ at my browser history ‘cause I wipe that shit so like...how do you know about...you know?” I asked, completely fuckin’ puzzled.  
Genie laughed just a little laugh “I don’t need to look at your computer, Richie, All I gotta do is pay attention. You get a hard-on every time I paint my toenails.”  
My stomach flipped like Frohike the time we were trying to get the location of that Japanese whaling fleet.  
“Wanna do this for real?” Genie said circling the front of my jeans with one foot.  
“Sure,” I said “Lay down on your belly.”  
“You don’t wanna go to the bedroom?” she asked.  
“Naw,” I said. In my fantasies we always did it here, on the couch. The first place I ever saw her barefoot.  
While Genie rolled onto her stomach I checked the blinds and the curtains, then I unzipped my jeans.  
Just like she did it in my head Genie was on the couch, the edge of her skirt ridin’ up so I could see just a hint of her round ass, the soles of her little feet, soft and pointing up, like she was offering them to me, and I guess she was. Nervous I knelt behind her on the couch and laid my cock against the soles of her feet. Genie, bein’ Genie, knew exactly what to do. She slid her silky stocking feet up down my dick and it felt like nothing I’d ever felt before. Not hot and tight like her ass, or over whelmingly slick and incredible like her mouth or her pussy, no, it felt good and, you know, manageable. Also dirty. Really dirty. In a good way.  
“Fuck that feels good,” I said.  
“Mmmmmmmmm,” Genie moaned in agreement not stopping for a second.  
I couldn’t say how many times I’d jerked off picturing exactly this scene. Genie was like the answer to every fantasy I’d had since puberty in one little package. The image in my head and the one in front of me were one and the same. It was too much.   
“Are you about to come, Richie?” Genie asked.  
“Uhhh,” was all I could say.  
Like that she was out from under me and had her mouth wrapped around my cock.  
That was all it took.  
My eyes rolled back in my head and I had to brace my arm aginst the wall to keep from falling over.  
“What’d you do that for? I was kinda wantin’ to come on your...uh...stocking feet,” I said.  
“And the couch, and the wall, and the carpet. You woulda made a fucking mess, Richie. It’s much neater if I swallow,” Genie said, licking the corner of her mouth “Besides, I like to swallow, it tastes nice.”  
“You’re fucking nuts, you know that?” I said falling back on the couch.  
“Takes one to know one,” she said snuggling up against me until she was on my lap.

She settled against me and it was a million miles from the night we met in the club. I was still watching the movie, more or less, but her ass was pressing pretty firmly against my crotch and my arms were around her waist, and I was alternately sniffing her hair and watching poor fucked-up Denny on the screen. 

Things were really nice and low key and sexy and a perfect distraction from numbers dancing in a circle every time I closed my eyes when Genie jumped up.

“There’s a cop at the door,” she whispered.

I sorta rolled off the couch and onto the floor, crawled to the window raising my head just enough to take a peek. I had to laugh. Late model rental. Ford. Way overpriced suit. Spitting sunflower seeds all over my front porch.

“Man, that’s no cop, that’s Mulder,” I jumped up just as he did his…well…his cop knock at the front door.

I threw open the door “What’re you doin’ here?”

Mulder smirked tossing two thick folders on the coffee table “I was in the neighborhood.” 

“Uh huh,” like I was buying that one.

“Are you going to introduce me?” Mulder said.  
“Yeah, sure, Mulder-Euglena, Euglena-Mulder,” I said.

“I don’t often meet women named for protists,” Mulder said.

“Eugenia, Genie, really,” Genie said “Euglena’s a pet name.”

Huh. I guess you could call it that.

“Pleased to meet you…miss?” Mulder said extending his hand to Genie but eyeing her wedding ring…and mine.

“Mrs.” I said, I kinda had to.

“Mrs. Langly?” Mulder asked, like it was that fucking surprising, okay, maybe it was, “Refreshing to meet a woman of such rare perception. Our boy Ringo’s usually something of an acquired taste,” and then the fucker kissed the back of her hand.

He totally stole that move from Frohike.

Genie gave Mulder a look like she had seen his kind before and was not impressed. Cool. 

“I like him,” she said. Extra cool. As a rule chicks dig Mulder. Back in the day he got laid only slightly more frequently than I did. I could never figure out the disconnect.

“That’s good, seriously, congratulations, I’m genuinely happy for you,” Mulder said, and I should have seen it coming. I mean, the guy is a hugger. Mulder put one arm around me and one around Genie and hugged us both at once “I do see why you haven’t contacted the guys yet.” Mulder grinned at Genie “You think Frohike gives Scully the eye...”

Whatever else you might say about the guy he always was a connoisseur when it came to the ladies.

He let us both go and just as I was picking up the files he snatched them back again and sat down on the couch “So tell me how you two crazy kids met.”

I was scared of what kind of shit Mulder would have to say if I told him the truth but I also knew I couldn’t successfully lie to Mulder. I could stonewall him sure, but actually lie? No. We had been down that road and history had taught us that I couldn’t pull it off.

Luckily Genie saved me the trouble of making the decision.

“I was stripping in a club and he paid me to sit on his lap,” she said.

“Then I got her fired, with a little help from Byers,” I said.

“You were by yourself,” she said.

“Yeah, I know, but the um survey thing was his suggestion. Truth be known John-Boytold me not to go, but the survey thing came up in the course of the argument,” I tried to explain.

“Don’t listen to him,” Genie said “I lost my own job, I do not require help from white boys for that.”

I shook my head “that was totally on me, regardless. The thing about Genie is, you mighta noticed how certain things tend to escape my attention…”

“Did you know someone has to remind him to eat?” Genie said.

“I have heard rumors to that effect, yes,” Mulder said, trying not to laugh. Asshole.

“And I might be a little disorganized,” I admitted. 

“You can’t find your own ass with both hands half the time,” Genie said.

Mulder was doing that thing, that trying-to-keep-a-straight-face thing “So Langly gave you a full time job?”

“The benefits are excellent,” Genie said with a little sexy smirk and I didn’t know whether I was proud or embarrassed. 

“What would you like me to tell Byers and Frohike? The two of them are reasonably assured you’ve either died of malnutrition or are currently lying suffocated under an avalanche of your own filth,” Mulder said putting his feet on the coffee table “You want me to lie?”

“Those two busy bodies’d be up my ass quicker than orcs on a dragon hoard. Worse than that they’d be up Genie’s. You know how they are. Tell ‘em I’m busy. Tell ‘em I got a lot a work,” I said “No lie, I got a lot on my plate right now. Soon as I’m done with my dissertation I’ll tell John-boy and Fro’ and they can give me the third degree.”

Genie was looking at me hard.

Mulder hesitated. He chewed on the corner of his mouth for a second, then dipped his head to let me know he wouldn’t rat me out. 

“So,” Mulder said holding up the files “You gonna introduce Mrs. Langly to Mom and Dad?” 

The files were marked MICHAEL LEIF and HEIDI WEISS.

I didn’t mean to but I kinda lost it “Fuck, Mulder, who else knows? Skinner? The whole fuckin’ FBI? How long have you been keepin’ me in the dark, man?”

“I began to have an inkling Wednesday when I was going through the old paper files in the bureau archives that have yet to be digitized. Behold clue number one; Michael Leif aka Leafy Green,” and Mulder opened Mike Leif’s file to his original mugshot, dated 1972 “Spooky, huh?”

Shit, if I t hought it was freaky seeing Mike in 2003 looking at a picture when he was more or less my age gave me fuckin’ chills, man. The only difference was the chin; Mike didn’t have the, you know, dimple.

Mulder opened Heidi’s file.  
She had the dimple, except it was pretty cute on her. 

“A little research on my part showed Cathy Sims, the ‘real’ Cathy Sims, reported her drivers license lost or stolen in February of ’69 three days after a woman using her social security number married John Paul Langly in Lincoln, Nebraska. Cathy herself avoided the police whenever possible, being in the service industry,” Mulder said “And not, if you’ll pardon the expression, waiting tables.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said.

“You thought Cathy Sims was your mom, didn’t you?” Mulder said, his head tilted just so, like he was realizing something. I knew he was thinking something, I just didn’t know what “So, did you two get friendly before or after you found out about Heidi Weiss? I’m asking for purely professional reasons.”

I blinked “Uhh Before, why?” What a weird question.

“Huh,” Mulder said pulling out his bag of seeds “I would have thought after. That’s very interesting. A Freudian would have imagined that it was the liberation as it were, freedom from the Oedipal strife of thinking your mother was a prostitute that enabled you to finally take action, sexually.”

I put my head in my hands “No. Stop. Don’t.”

“This line of discussion doesn’t bother you, does it, Genie?” Mulder said, still eating.

“Nope, not me,” Genie said folding her arms across her chest “But Richie didn’t take any action. I did.”

“So you were, what, overcome by geek boy’s masculine charms?” Mulder said.

Fuck. I gave up and closed my eyes.

“Anybody ever tell you you were nosy, Agent Mulder?” Genie said sitting on my lap.

“The I in FBI does stand for Investigation,” Mulder said.

“Do you have a problem with me?” Genie asked, because, yeah, she was that subtle.

“No, not per see, but perhaps I should explain something about myself,” Mulder said and I wanted to stick my fingers in my ears but I was afraid it wouldn’t work. I shut my eyes tighter and covered my head with one of Genie’s throw pillows.

“Oh yeah,” Genie said. Clearly I needed a bigger pillow.

“Genie, I lost my sister when I was twelve years old. I have very few people in my life can I rely on. Those I do have, I tend to be protective of. Ringo Langly is one of four. We’ve been friends for 14 years; he’s been there for me through divorce, unemployment, major depression, gun shot wounds, stabbings, fire, brain surgery, kidnapping, and that barely begins to scratch the surface. So you should believe me when I tell you, if you hurt this guy, break his heart, I’ll see you regret it. Not a threat, simply fair warning,” Mulder said while I tried not to hyper ventilate.

Genie was still sitting on my lap “Are you crazy?”

“Quite possibly,” Mulder said “but I mean every word I say.”

Genie leaned back sort of snuggling against me and my pillow, “So do I, so you probably ought to believe me when I say if I ever do Richie wrong you have my permission to shoot me as too dumb to live ‘cause he is the most stand up guy I have ever known, and I’ve known afew.”

“I bet you have,” Mulder said.

“That a crime?” Genie said. 

Mulder smiled “On the contrary I’d say experience is an admirable trait in any field of endeavour.”

“It’s kinda nice to get equipment fresh out the packaging, too,” Genie said and Mulder started coughing, like choking on a sunflower seed, and Genie pulled the pillow off my face “Jesus, come out from there, Richie.”

Mulder held up his hands “Change of topic, I promise. I’ve heard all I can take about Langly’s package.”

“Um yeah,” I agreed. Genie took my hands and wrapped them around her waist.

“Doesn’t bother me,” Genie said “I could talk about Richie all day long.”

“Obviously,” Mulder coughed.

“C’mon, make with the files already,” I said taking one hand off Genie’s waist and holding it out for the papers in Mulder’s hands.

“Did you know you’re Jewish?” Mulder said holding the files just out of reach.

Yeah, right.

“Now you’re just fuckin’ with me,” I said, that was almost as likely as me being Chinese. 

“No shit, my brother Red Sea Pedestrian,” Mulder said pulling the files back “Heidi grew up in southern California. Her father, Dick Weiss, wrote and arranged t.v. scores. Meanwhile Mike Leif grew up on the East Coast. You might be interested to know, his dad changed the family name to Leif from Lefkowicz. Sam Leif was in the insurance business. The interesting part is, in what may be argued as ground zero for the formation of the Weathermen, Samuel Lefkowicz aka Sam Leif sent his son, Mike, to the same Hebrew school as young Micah Hoffman. The two boys were by all reports something of a discipline problem. Frankly, I’m jealous.”

I sat there, trying to process what Mulder was saying. I blinked five or six times trying to clear my head.

“How is that even possible?” I asked.

“From Sammy Davis Jr. to Ringo Langly, Jews come in all shades.”

The last 60 seconds made no sense, my brain couldn’t process ‘em, so I was gonna disregard ‘em. 

Mulder finally fucking handed me the folders. There they were, in black and white; Heidi Weiss and Michael Leif’s FBI files.

“So how cold is Heidi Weiss’s trail?” I asked, shaking off the weird confusion about who the fuck I even was that had begun that first night Genie crawled in bed with me. Girls didn’t want Ringo Langly, that was axiomatic. Super hot chicks? There shouldn’t have even been a question. And yet there she was, there she continued to be.

Somehow I had gone from the kid nobody wanted to the boy everybody was looking out for. Now I had gone from being wrong about “who” I was to not knowing “what” I was or even what version of god I didn’t believe in. Even if Mulder was right and I had technically been born a Jewish Atheist to a couple of 60’s radicals I still felt like a Presbyterian Atheist, the kid of a big dumb farmer and a ghost everyone in town whispered was a whore. It was a weird question to ask myself; did it make a difference whether I was an anomalous descendent of countless generations of dull ass farmers or a more-or-less parr-for-the-course scion of guys who had been kicked out of one European country after another for the high crime of being different?

Mulder stretched a little “Well, considering that the Bureau hasn’t got around to digitizing any of these old files and the only copy is no longer in the FBI archive but in your hand, I would say stone cold. It would be a shame if those finger prints were to accidentally fall onto a barbeque grill…just sayin’, since those and the surveillance photos are the only concrete evidence linking her to the bombing. I’m assuming you’ve located Heidi and don’t want to risk bringing the feds down on her if there’s any chance she’s being watched.”

What could I say, dude was spooky and he’d just set my mom free, really free, for the first time since December 1968.

“Okay, Karnak,” I said swallowing “Wanna tell me this week’s lottery numbers, too?”

“As if I’d tell you. You’d spend it all on junk food and high grade electronics,” Mulder said.

I shrugged “You know me, Mulder, what can I say?”

 

“A simple thank you will suffice,” Mulder said.

“Thanks, man,” I said looking at the FBI photos of my mom and …that guy. It was easy to see they were taken at a distance with a telephoto lens. Judging from the year and the quality one of two possible models.

“So,” Mulder said kinda folding his hands together on his lap.

“So?” I asked.

“Any good places to eat around here? Agent Scully says she wants something that requires silverware,” Mulder said.

“Scully’s here?” I asked. 

“Yup, and she should be done with our background checks any time now,” Mulder said twiddling his thumbs “I told you we were in the neighborhood.”

“Agent Hottie?” Genie said in that way that drove me up the wall. Jealous. Like I was anything to be jealous of, and like Agent Scully…yeah that’s realistic.

Mulder laughed “I’m going to tell her you said that.”

“Not me, dude, that’s pure Frohike,” I said.

“You’re the one I heard it from,” Genie said.

“Whose side are you on?” I said.

“You want me to lie?” she said putting her arms around my neck.

“If it keeps Scully from kicking my ass, yeah,” I said but Genie just laughed. And kissed me. The kissing part was good.

“Why don’t you guys come along? My treat,” Mulder said “The bureau is once again trying their damnedest to make me quit and take up a life of leisure. You can help me craft my carefully worded resignation.”

“Sure,” I said, “anything for a free meal.”

“Besides, you know Agent Scully, this is one of those things she’s going to have to see for herself,” Mulder said taking out his phone.

~~   
The next week was pretty lame. I mean I was kinda distracted. It seemed like every few minutes Genie was on my case.

“Richie, put down that file and eat something,” 

“Richie, put down that file and get in the shower or you’ll be late for work.”

“Richie, put down the file you’ve got to grade papers.”

“Richie, aren’t you going to work on your dissertation?”

“Okay, Richie, you’re not gonna figure anything out by staring at that file that you didn’t figure out the first 100 times you read it,” Genie said one night while I laid in bed looking at the files.

“Huh?” I said I may not have been paying great attention.

“C’mon, get your ass up,” she said in my Einsturzende Neubaten t-shirt with her bare legs. It was a good look, but then all her looks were good looks.

“What for?” I asked.

“C’mon, C’mon, get up, go do your deal you do,” she waved at the bedroom monitor “Go steal us two tickets to Canada, you’re makin’ me crazy. You know you wanna go see her. Stop bein’ such a wuss and get the damn tickets already,” Genie said.

“But what if she…” I started but Genie cut me off.

“Get the tickets, Richie,”

“But what if it…”

“Get the tickets or I swear I’m gonna…” she balled up her little sparrow fist and shook it at me.

“Sheesh, okay, okay,” I said moving the files to the night stand “Keep your panties on…or you know, take ‘em off, ‘cause this is only gonna take about 3 minutes.”   
~~  
What a time to go to Toronto. If there was one thing in favor of Oklahoma it was the fact that it was still in the 80’s in December. Toronto was not in the 80’s.

Me and Genie were fucking freezing to death in spite of our coats, and hats, and gloves.

“F…f…fuck a whole lot of this shit,” Genie said, her teeth chattering as we went from the cab to the building that was supposed to be my mom’s. Intersection of Beresford and Bloor. Apartment above a cafe. 

“Oh god, I think I’m gonna die,” I said, because…well…it was that cold.

“Then get your ass inside the building,” Genie said standing at the door.

“What if it’s not her?” I said stopping where I stood, forgetting about the snow falling on my head “What if I can’t tell. I dunno if I can tell. It’s been 28 years.”

“Richie,” all Genie said was my name before she turned around, linked my arm with her arm, and dragged me to the door “No matter what happens you still got me, remember.” 

And I was grateful. Don’t get me wrong, I was grateful. I was just scared shitless of meeting my mother. I mean, what are you supposed to say to someone who ditched you when you were 5 years old? Somebody you thought was dead for half your life? Anybody who could answer that one was way ahead of me. I had nothin’. I couldn’t even make myself knock on the door. Thank god for Genie.

Genie gave me a kiss that was so …um yeah, one of those, that I didn’t know which was up for a minute, then she knocked on the door and sort of shoved me forward.

The door opened and ... there was a woman in overalls and a thermal shirt and I didn’t have to worry about recognizing her. She recognized me.

She stood there with her mouth open and took about 30 seconds to go from stunned silence to bawling. Not like she leaked a little, nope, she was full on ugly-crying. Thirty seconds after she started bawling she grabbed me and put her arms around me, still crying, except she kept saying “Ringo, you’re dead,” over and over.

All I could do was stand there while she rocked back and forth. I didn’t even hug her back.

I don’t remember coming in or sitting down but the next thing I knew me and Genie were sitting with her on the couch.  
“Uh, Mom?” I said while she wiped her face. It was familiar. I mean, when I was a kid and I cried my whole face would go red and spotted and my dad would freak out. The day she left he took me to the emergency room. All I could say to the doctor was that I wanted my mom until I couldn’t breathe. I got my first inhaler that day. 

Her face was all red and spotted like that.

“Oh, Ringo, I don’t know where to even start, is this your…?” she asked.

“Wife,” I said and she grabbed Genie’s hand.

“Eugenia,” Genie said. 

“Are you happy? Is he…is he a good husband?” my mom asked. It seemed like a weird question but it was weird suddenly having my mom, right there, with me. I guess it was as weird for her as it was for me. 

Genie, being Genie, had to smart off “My favorite so far.”

My mom laughed and then wiped her eyes again “I’m sorry, I don’t know what to say.”

I opened my mouth and then closed it again, taking in the room. My mom’s place was about as far from Mike Leif’s as it was possible to be. I guess she was still kind of a hippy. You could smell incense in the air. The walls were all painted different bright colors, like in an Indian restaurant. The blinds were open to the snowy outside and the….well everything was bright and cheerful. A row of prisms hung on fishing line in both windows breaking the light into a spectrum and throwing it against the wall. The only thing she had in common with Mike was an old record played and stacks and stacks of vinyl.

Genie poked me in the back, and jerked her head at the wall above the sofa.  
Shit. 

Above the sofa was umm, yours truly. My byline photo from the Magic Bullet blown up from postage stamp size to ginormous. I don’t have the face for that. It made me wince.

“You a subscriber?” I asked. I was up to five words. A banner day for Ringo Langly. Normally I can’t shut up, then I walk around wishing I could pull the words back into my mouth, even though I only say about 10% of the things I think. I have a track record of picking the wrong ones, but that day I couldn’t get out anything. Every fuckin’ syllable was a struggle. 

“Micah used to send them to my sister,” my mom said “You know Micah Hoffman?”

“Not personally,” I said “But I’m familiar with the guy’s work.” 14 words and counting.

“He helped me keep track of what you were up to. You scared us half to death every month,” she said.

“Us?” I asked upping the count to 15. For the first time since we left the house to go on this bullshit adventure I had an identifiable feeling. Pissed off. I was definitely pissed off.

“Micah, Clara and I. We were all so worried. You took so many risks for the paper, Ringo. Micah talked about making contact with you so many times but I was afraid…” She said.

“Sounds like you guy were real cozy. Was he porking ya?” the words just kinda popped out but I didn’t regret them. I had a thousand worse things boiling inside my skull.

We’d been reunited less than five minutes and my mom slapped me. Hard. That was cool. Most of my interactions with women before Genie ended that way. Besides my whole face was burning so bad I hardly noticed the spot where she hit me.

“You have a lot of fun after you ditched me and Dad for your cool friends?” I said.

“You sound like Mike,” she said and that hurt way more than a little smack on the cheek.

“Everybody in Saltville said you were a whore,” I said everything threatening to tumble out.

“I’m not surprised,” she said, suddenly cold “That’s usually the first charge leveled at a woman who deviates from the norm and Saltville is nothing if not predictable.”

“My dad, my real dad, the one who stuck around and raised me like a chump, he thinks you’re some kinda saint,” I said.

“Say whatever you want about me but I don’t want to hear one word against John Paul Langly,” she, her , Heidi, my mom, said.

“Or what?” I said.

“Or you can leave,” Heidi said.

I sat there seriously considering it for a minute. I felt Genie’s hand on the back of my neck. 

“I never wanted to leave you. I wanted to take you with me, both of you,” she said “You and John Paul.”

“This is the first I heard of it,” I said my heart racing. Heidi got up and walked to the window.

“John Paul wouldn’t have it, he said it was no life for a little boy like you. It was the only thing we ever fought about. He thought I should stay. I thought we should all leave. In the end we compromised. I left,” she said with her back to me.

“What do you mean ‘a boy like me’? You sayin’ it’s my fault I got ditched?” I asked.

“Of course not but you were so high strung…” she said.

“High strung how?” I said and Genie gave me a look like I had to be kidding. Yeah, I knew, “high strung” was probably the phrase most commonly applied me… right after ugly and blonde. So fucking what? I wanted to know what my mom meant when she said it.

“Well,” my mom said folding her arms across her chest, inside her overalls “for instance, the first month of kindergarten you wet your pants every day at school so your teacher would call me and I would come take you home.”

I had no memory of that happening, only the memory of being teased about it by other kids.

“You needed a stable environment,” she said “I couldn’t give you that. I was so afraid, jumping at every shadow.”

“And Saltville’s about as stable as a tomb,” I said.

“I didn’t want to leave you, Ringo,” she said turning this way and that like she didn’t know which way to go. 

“And if you had it to do over again?” I asked.

“I would take the two of you with me, and probably regret it for the rest of my life. You have no idea how much I’ve missed you, but I don’t know, maybe you were better off without me…It was so stupid of me to keep in contact with Mike…I felt like… I felt like I owed him that much… to let him see what an amazing kid you were…we were all so proud of you; me, Mike, John Paul. Bill Kunstler said he spent more time talking about you than he did about his defense. When he threatened to turn me in I knew I’d messed up so bad and it could have cost you everything. You’re everything I could have hoped for. A dream come true.   
The night before the bombing Mike and I laid in bed and we talked about how you were going to be this great revolutionary…this amazing guy…and now it seems like the one thing that jerk was right about. The work you’ve done…You have no idea how proud I am of your work on the paper. Although I do wish you’d be more careful. When I thought we lost you it felt like the end of the world… Honest to god, I have no idea what I’d do if I had to do it all over again,” she said walking toward me.

“I coulda used a mom growin’ up,” I said lookin’ around at her happy, fuckin’ light little apartment. Even though my digging showed she’d only been there a few years I imagined myself as a kid in a place like this, with music playin’ and pictures on the walls. Books on the shelves and a kitchen full of burlap coffee bags stamped “fair trade”. 

“I told John Paul to find someone else, re-marry,” She said, like that meant anything. I wasn’t my dad but I could see how pointless it would be to try to replace someone like her with some Saltville girl. 

“We didn’t need someone else, we needed you,” I said, before I could stop myself, my damn allergies started up again, in spite of the snow. Maybe it was her damn incense.

Then a funny thing happened. My mom reached up and wiped my face with her hands.

“I’m sorry, Ringo, what else can I say? I’m sorry, baby, I never wanted it to turn out the way it did. I would have given anything to watch you grow up,” she said and like that there was a hitch from down deep in my chest and the water was, like pouring down my face, and I was making this noise, this terrible noise from down deep inside, and…uh Heidi, my mom Heidi, pulled me to her and we stood there a long time, both of our faces wet and making terrible noises. 

~~  
Genie, bein’ Genie, she couldn’t leave it alone.  
For better or worse it was like having both Byers and Fro’ rolled into one hot little chick.  
Good thing I was crazy in love with her.

“It’s pretty cool you and Richie’s dad, I mean, Mr. Langly, still bein’ in love after all these years,” she said that night on my mom’s balcony. The two of them were smoking. I was standing in the doorway trying to join the conversation without freezing my ass off. 

I was buzzed. We’d been gabbing since noon and there was so much left to say.

My mom pulled her coat tighter and took a drag off her cigarette “Oh I don’t know, Genie, I mean I know how I feel but John Paul…it’s a lot to ask of someone, anyone. Here, take my kid, oh and would you mind waiting around 28 years until Ringo steals all the evidence in my case?”

“But he did,” Genie insisted “He waited and you didn’t even have to ask.”

“I don’t even know if he’d be interested,” my mom said.

“I guarantee he’s interested,” Genie said, in that way of hers, with her cigarette between her lips and her chin tipped up.

Thing was, I knew she was right.

“So, Ringo,” My mom said, changing the subject “You never told me what you’re doing for work.”

I winced, it was kind of embarrassing, and not nearly as cool as working on the paper, even if the pay was marginally better. Meaning it was better than nothing. Two steps up financially from publishing a paper. One step up from “do you want fries with that?”

 

“You mean since he died?” Genie said “Richie’s a math professor.”

I really wished she’d stop saying that.

“Not really,” I said exasperated “I teach crappy remedial math at OCU until I give my dissertation in May. Then maybe it won’t all be fuckin’ tryin’ to get Clever Hans to count above ten. Maybe.”

My mom threw her hands up in the air, like there was cop with a gun in front of her, and laughed “I Knew it! I knew! I saw it coming a mile away.”

“What?” I asked.

“Your first words. I knew it was going to be math,” she cackled, okay, my mom cackled, but I still had no idea what she was talking about.

“What?” I had no idea what she was talking about.

“John Paul never told you?” she said.

“Told me what?” I asked.

“When you were a baby, I used to put you in my backpack and help John Paul around the farm. At the end of the day when you couldn’t stand to be in that thing anymore John Paul would pull out his record player and his records and let you wear yourself out dancing around the living room,” she said.

“And?” I said. It didn’t sound like the dad I knew. I remembered the records but I always figured my mom had left them behind. Never that my dad had brought them into the relationship. He never played them after she left.

“You were so little you couldn’t even walk yet, and John Paul was dancing you around the living room. It was the Beatles. Twist and Shout was about to start and you looked right at John Paul and said ‘One, Two, Three, Four,’ clear as a bell,” she said.

“Really? The first thing I ever said?” I said.

“Neither of us could believe it,” she said, laughing “We must have played that track a dozen times that night, making you count.”

“What did I say after that?” I asked.

My mom cackled again “Everything, after that there was no holding you back.”

I looked at Genie who was grinning like crazy, “so sue me, I’m loquacious.”

Who ever I was, where ever it came from, I’d been that way from the start.

~~  
Genie was weird on the plane ride back. I’m not the most observant guy as far as that kind of thing goes but she was quiet. Usually she talks, you know, a lot, like as much as I do but we were halfway to Chicago and she still hadn’t said a word. Not even I can miss that kind of shit.

“What’s up?” I asked ‘cause I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Genie just shrugged.

“Somethin’ wrong?” I asked.

Genie shook her head, hard, and pulled a skymall out of the seat in front of me. Then I heard it, a little sniff. I leaned forward and held my glasses at just the right distance to get a close look at her face. Her eyes looked...wet.

She blinked a couple times and then another sniff.

Was she about to turn on the waterworks? And why? I hadn’t actually seen her cry before...although she was more threatening to cry than actually squeezing out eye water. Forecast called for a 20% chances of boohooing...possibly 15... 10% maybe?

“Uh Genie?” I said because it was all a mystery “You okay?”

“Sure,” Genie said with like no inflection whatsoever not even bothering to glance my way. Nope, her eyes were trained on the skymall like it was the Fortean Times. 

I looked at her harder then kinda elbowed her in the side. For half a second she looked pissed off then her something behind her eyes...well it didn’t soften but it did change and her shoulders turned and her chin lifted and she gave me a look I’d learned pretty well in the last six weeks. Her mouth was open just a little and her eyes were open as wide as they would go and her left hand went from the skymall to my knee.

Then she looked sideways in the direction of the bathroom.

About two seconds later she got up without bothering to excuse herself. I counted to 30 and followed her.

I knocked on the john door and got pulled in by my shirt. 

“Genie, fuck, Genie, what’s goin’ on?” I said not exactly cooperating as she tried to pull down my pants in the cramped, cold, weird, airplane toilet.

“I didn’t bring you in here to talk, Richie,” she said.

“Apparently not,” I said taking hold of her hands “You okay?”

“So, like, how many different ways do you need me to say I don’t want to talk about it?” she said getting pissy. Great.

“I ain’t tryin’ to interrogate ya. I just wanna, you know, help you out, make you feel better,” I said “You make me feel better all the time.”

It made my guts churn the way she tried to smile but couldn’t quite get there, only ended up looking sadder. Pretty as a little doll but sad sad sad.

“You know how to make me feel better, Richie,” Genie said.

Yeah, as a matter of fact I did. I reached behind me and made sure the door was locked and I kept my own pants on, but I put one arm behind her shoulders to kind of hold her to my chest, hold her steady, and the other hand I slid into her open jeans, inside the panties, over the smooth mound, and curled two fingers inside her while I pressed my palm against her clit. She was wet and she was tense. It hardly took any time at all before she was shaking with her fists in a clench. 

Back in our seats she slumped against me, almost asleep “Mind tellin’ me what all that was about?” I asked as she tried to burrow into my side.

“I hope my kids don’t hate me when they grow up, “ she muttered, drifting off, her eyes closed.

“Are you kiddin’?” I said putting my arm around her, even though it was really freakin’ uncomfortable “They’re like the vice president and treasurer of the Genie Black Star fan club.”

“Who’s president?” she said wrapping both her arms around me.

“Me, duh,” I said kissing the top of her head.

~~


	8. Opening Shrodinger's Box

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which our hero meets his family and is surprised to learn that nothing he learns about them is surprising, as a bonus against his will he learns what parenting is.

~~  
I’d like to say things kind of, I dunno, evened out after that, but that wouldn’t be strictly true. I mean, yeah, for the first time I had a pretty good grip on my actual life story, more or less. I knew where my mom was and who she was.

I kept the loop-line-shunt on the phone pretty much 24/7 because, well, my mom called me every few days. I worked on my dissertation. The girls came over and spent the night on weekends, not all the time but sometimes. It was like all of a sudden I went from hardly knowing any chicks to having chicks of all ages, races, and denominations bossing me around. 

I liked Genie’s girls okay. Their taste in t.v. was shit but the girls themselves were pretty cool. I sat through America’s Next Top Model exactly once. Or um… not quite once. Not all the way through but enough of that shit to count.

“Your mom’s prettier than any uh them,” I said while Paris and Stormy rolled around on the carpet trying to decide which skinny flat-chested chick they were rooting for.

“Maybe,” Stormy said pausing to shovel popcorn into her face and crane her neck at where Genie was in the kitchen, scrubbing. Genie would not, literally could not, stop and join the rest of us until the cleanliness reached some level of perfection only Genie was qualified to recognize. Welcome to my Friday night, kid.

“No way!” Paris said with a snort. 

“Yes way,” I said , because, duh, it was true.

“Her legs are stubby,” Paris said “Her head is too round, like a bowling ball...”

“Oh puleeeez, your mom is so much hotter than those chicks ever thought about being,” I said, bringing the ungrateful squirt up to speed.

“Her butt is too big and she’s got those boobs, half her shirts don’t fit right,” Paris said shaking her head and picking through the popcorn in her hand “She’s got a fat face, too.”

It was mindboggling that anyone anywhere thought boobs could be too big, like that could possibly be a thing and also Genie was really pretty. Really really pretty. It was nice the way her face was soft. 

“Are you nuts? Girl is gorgeous,” I said.

“Of course you’d say that,” Paris said rolling her eyes “Besides, she’s almost 30. She’s not a girl.”

“What do you mean ‘ of course I’d say that’? What’re you tryin’ to say?” I said startin’ to get, I dunno, annoyed, or somethin’.

“I’m saying you’re a guy,” Paris said taking another handful of popcorn, with that tone in her voice like she was the grown up and I was the kid. It was kind of a habit with her.

“And? What’s that ‘sposed to mean?” I asked.

“I mean you don’t know the difference between pretty and sexy,” she said primly, like it was a fact of life. That kid was a riddle wrapped in an enigma. How could she think those things about her mom when she looked like Genie’s only slightly shorter twin? Did she think all that crap about herself, too? I mean, she was nowhere near Genie but she already had more curves than any of the beanpoles currently on the lame ass reality tv. Was that it? She was pretty and sure to only get prettier as time went on and all she wanted was to look like some blonde string bean chick?

“You wanna know what I think?” I said.

“Not really,” she said looking away.

“I think you been brainwashed by the advertising industry,” I said grabbing the remote off the coffee table “We ain’t watchin’ this shit no more.”

Both girls started howling but I stood fast.

“Nope, we’re watching Dr. Who,” I said.

“We don’t even know what that is!” Paris shouted.

“Well it’s high time you found out, Munchkins,” I said.

Paris never would admit Dr. Who was better than that Top Model bullshit but she never bitched about watching it.

Stormy was hooked, though, and not too cool to let on that she loved it. Every Friday the first thing she asked me was “We watching watching Dr. Who, Richie?”

My answer?

“What do you think, Stormageddon?”

~~

Genie, meanwhile, did her best to keep shit running smoothly at home and at school so I could finish my dissertation on schedule. All I had to do was show up and do math, sign what she put in front of me to sign, eat what she put in front of me to eat, and fuck her at the end of the day. Sometimes the morning or afternoon. 

As soon as the new year started I started my fucking Russian class which was a circle of Hell in and of itself, but I did it. Tuesday and Thursday. 3 to 5. Unlike the last time I took it in um 1988, I had Euglena there to make sure I studied and did my homework. On one hand it was kinda insulting, on the other it was probably necessary. I tend to have trouble making myself do shit I don’t feel like doing. I generally don’t like doin’ shit that doesn’t, you know, come pretty natural to me. Discipline ain’t my strong suit. But Genie was a hard ass that way.

It became a thing on Friday nights for her to have me and the girls lined up at the kitchen table, withholding pizza and movies until we finished our school work. I threatened to alert Amnesty International but she was fucking immovable. Girl had no pity. It was a good thing she was so hot.

Spring break kinda snuck up on me without me even noticing. I mean, like, one day I looked up from the computer ‘cause Genie was talking to me. I had no idea what she’d just said.

“Huh?” I said.  
“I said we’re gonna hafta leave right after school in order to make it to Lincoln in time to meet your mom’s flight. Jimmy said he’d have their bags ready,” Genie said in a way that reminded me of Yves and made me wonder, just for a second, if it was me or them.

“What?” I asked because I was even more confused than before.

“You told your dad you’d come and visit,” She said.

“Yeah, for spring break,” I said. That had to be months away. Weeks in a worse case scenario.

“Yeah, and spring break starts Friday,” Genie said.

“You sure?” I asked her. That didn’t seem right.

“Yeah, and I talked to your dad. He said for me to bring the girls,” she said like I was an idiot “We talked about this, Richie.”

Which probably meant she talked to me while my brain was somewhere else, in which case I would agree to pretty much anything. Trip to the Moon? Tiger Hunting? Proctological exam? Phil Collins concert? Sign me up.

“What did Jimmy say?” I asked. I mean he was the custodial parent after all, he could always say ‘no’ to us taking the girls out of state.

“Jimmy’s trying to get into college. He’s taking some test. He says he could use the study time,” Genie said. 

“And my mom? Did you talk to my dad about that, too?” I asked.

“That,” Euglena said laying her hand on my chest “is a surprise.”

“Yeah, I bet,” I said, I mean I knew my dad would be happy to see my mom, but he wasn’t a young guy. He had to be like, 50 or 51 by now. I hoped he didn’t have a heart attack or some shit “I guess I need to check the oil and tire pressure and all that crap if I’m driving from Bumfuck, Oklahoma to Bumfuck, Nebraska tomorrow.”

Genie’s eyebrows moved toward eachother “I think I said that.”

~~   
Turned out that Genie drove all the way to Lincoln. I didn’t mean to fall asleep but Heckle and Jekyll were arguing so Genie told me to put on my headphones and rest for a little while while she drove. Trouble was before I knew it Genie was shaking me awake in the parking lot of the Lincoln airport.

Heidi, my mom, hugged me before I could figure out if I wanted a hug or not. Genie threw her bags in the trunk while I was still rubbing my eyes.

“You wanna go back to sleep, Richie?” Genie said tucking my hair behind my ear.

“Naw, I can drive to the farm, it’s cool, besides I don’t want you gettin’ lost on the way,” I said. Man, those turn offs could be hard enough to spot in broad daylight.

“Okay,” Genie said puttin’ her hand flat on the middle of my chest the way she liked to “I’m gonna get in the back with the girls so you can talk to your mom, okay?”

“Oh, Genie, you don’t have to do that,” Heidi said sounding like any mom anywhere and not some counter culture radical “I’m fine in the back. You and Ringo should...”

“I see Richie all the time,” Genie said “ ‘sides I’m about to crash.”

 

Genie went to sleep in the back with the girls but neither me or mom said a word on the way to the farm. I think we were both nervous about how dad would react.

We shouldn’t have worried.

~~

It was dark the way it is at night in the country. Genie and the girls were still asleep in the back when I pulled into the farm. I guess my dad really did want to see me because he was waiting on the porch when I stopped the car.

It only took him about 30 seconds to spot Heidi, I mean Mom, in the passenger side. He stopped in his tracks and just stared while she got out of the car. Then, like he was waking up from a deep sleep he kinda shook himself and said “Heidi?” then he shouted “Heidi!” and ran for her. The old man straight up ran for her and picked her up, swung her in a circle and the two of them started kissing eachother like a couple of teenagers.

It was kinda gross.

I mean, they were my parents.

“Oh Nice,” Euglena said in the backseat. Easy for her to say, it wasn’t her mom and dad making out.

“I uh...I uh...uh fixed the spare room up for Ringo’s girls,” dad said as soon as they took a breather from sucking face “I can make you a place there, if you want.”

First of all it was fucking weird to hear someone refer to them as my girls, second of all he could not be hinting at what I thought he was hinting at.

I watched in horror as my mom held my dad’s hands like the whole world had shrunk down to John Paul Langly.

“I was hoping I could room with you, if you don’t mind,” Heidi said.

Oh god. Oh god. Oh god. Did she really say that? Right in front of me and Genie?

 

My dad didn’t say a word, instead he brought Heidi’s hands up and kissed them, over and over. This had nothin’ to do with Mulder and Frohike’s bullshit smoothness, this was something else.

I woke up the next morning and it was like I had fallen into some alternate universe where Heidi Weiss never left us, where I grew up about as normal as I am capable of being.  
Like I had it all, Mom and Dad, a couple of goofy kids, and a super hot, if somewhat uptight, wife.

The whole house was flooded with the smell of my mom making a big cooked breakfast while my dad worked hard at keepin’ a straight face, even though a big grin kept sneakin’ up on him while he drank his coffee. 

Genie, as usual, was already up, already in the bathroom, already half-way through the requisite year and a half she took to feel presentable. The girls were at the table. Stormy, at least, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, which fit seein’ how squirrelly she was.

Paris, bein’ Paris, was scowling her way through breakfast.

“Are you Richie’s step-mom?” she asked taking a bite of potatoes.

“As a matter of fact I am his mother,” Heidi said smiling from ear to ear, like she’d pulled off some big time hack.

“I thought you were gone. Richie told me you were gone,” Paris said taking another bite, eggs this time.

“I came back,” Heidi said, her eyes twinkling. Like that my dad reached out his hand to her and she took it. The two of them like that, holding hands in the middle of the kitchen made all the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I’d be a different person today if I’d grown up seein’ that every day.

“What’s your name?” Paris asked.

“Heidi,” Heidi said “Heidi Langly,” looking at my dad. 

“My name’s Paris, Paris Janelle Black Star,” Paris said splitting open a biscuit.

Heidi gave Paris the kind of long serious look Paris was only used to dishing out “Paris is a little elegant to use on a farm, don’t you think?”

“It’s my name,” Paris asked, squinting to let Heidi know she was on thin ice.

However Heidi was not fazed “I think you could use a nickname. PJ’s a good nickname. Sturdy enough to use around cows. I think Paris might give them a complex. John Paul can tell you there’s nothing worse than a neurotic cow, and cow therapists are expensive. First of all you have to pay for them to bring out a trailer with a really big couch,” she said. My mom was probably funnier than every other person in the house put together. My dad was working hard at not laughing. I had not seen him smile so much in my life, cumulatively, as he had since my mom showed up.

Suddenly Stormy spoke up, in what she usually called her ‘monster voice’.

“I am called Stormageddon; Dark Lord of all. May I have more food, please?” Stormy growled handing Heidi her empty plate then sticking out her tongue “that hurts.”

“Then don’t do it, dummy,” Paris said rubbing her temples while Heidi filled the plate at the stove “Could I have a cup of coffee? Please?”

“Ringo? Is that okay?” Heidi asked. It was weird for anybody to ask my permission about anything where the girls were concerned, but Genie was still doing whatever it was she did to herself in the morning.

I shrugged “She has a cup every morning at home,” I caught my dad looking surprised.

“Cream and sugar?” Heidi asked maybe hoping to dilute it enough to seem, I dunno, appropriate for an 11 year old.

“Black, please,” Paris said “dairy makes me gassy.”

Yup, that was Paris, the world’s only middle-aged 6th grader.

At least she was being polite. Genie had probably put the fear of god in them on the drive up, I wondered if it would last through breakfast without their mom glaring at them every time they stepped out of line. 

“Lactose Intolerant,” I said.

Paris nodded taking a cup from my mom “Thank you,” she sighed breathing in the steam.

“What about you, Ringo?” Heidi asked, coffee pot in her hand.

“Richie takes extra cream extra sugar,” Stormy growled in her monster voice.

“Because he is a wuss,” Paris said.

“Sugar is empty calories,” Stormy said, still in her monster voice. From what I understood it was from the gospel of Jimmy, Mr. Fitness. At his house they lived on grilled fish and wheatgrass juice or some shit.

“Sugar is good,” I said “I like sugar.”

“We know,” Stormy said in her monster voice then coughed with the effort of keeping it up.

“So what are we supposed to call you?” Paris asked Heidi.

“All the white kids at school call their grandmother’s meemaw,” Stormy said in her regular voice.

“Eeeeeww! No!” Paris said disgusted. From the look on her face I would say Heidi was with Paris on that one.

“John and Heidi works for me,” My mom said.

“John and Heidi, John and Heidi,” Paris said like she was trying it on for size.

“I shall call thee Mothership and Cowtron,” Stormy said pointing her fork first at my mom then at my dad.

My dad looked at me like I was somehow to blame. 

“Don’t look at me, Dude,” I told my dad “She’s the one that said it.”

~~

The next two days were pretty okay. Yeah, I helped my dad out with the cattle, which was as unfun as ever, but Heidi joined in and the three of us talked and laughed and my dad was not quite as uncool as I remembered from growing up. Maybe it was my mom being there, maybe I sold him short, who knows. Genie cleaned, organized, and scrubbed my dad’s house because that’s what she did, who she was. I don’t think the house was ever that clean before. Even though she was teeny tiny Genie was a lot of help in other ways too. Havin’ spent seven years on her grandparents farm growin’ up she was real familiar with the kind of crap that needed doin, even though her grandpa kept beef steers, not dairy cows. She appreciated farm life almost as much as I did.

Left handed. Farm hatin’. Genie and I had more in common than might be apparent at first glance.

The girls ran wild and showed up for meals so dirty it made Euglena wince, which I figured was kinda the point of spring break on a farm in the middle of fucking nowhere. There weren’t alot of perks to a vacation in Nebraska, they might as well make the most of the ones they got. Besides, Genie thought letting a kid go to bed without bein’ scrubbed within an inch of their lives was grounds for calling child protective services.  
So the girls might have come in dirty but they always went to bed clean.

It was awesome getting laid in the bed I slept in for the first 15 years of my life. I considered taking Genie up to the hayloft, too, except that it was bound to be itchy and uncomfortable, and when we got there the door was barred from the inside and we could hear the Beatles vibrating through the metal walls.

 

I backed away, I had zero interest in finding out what was going on on the other side of that barn door.

It was more than enough to know my parents were in there  
~~  
Monday at lunch was when it all started going down hill. 

First the phone rang. We all looked at eachother.

“That’s the first time the phone’s rung since we got here,” Genie said.

“H’lo, Langly residence,” you couldn’t tell a thing from my dad’s expression “Speaking,”  
I wondered who’d be calling my dad.

“Umm hmmm mmmmm hhmmmmm. I heard you the first time. He’s a grown man so why don’t you ask him yourself?” my dad said then held out the weird old rotary phone to me.

On pure instinct I backed up like the damn phone was a snake.

“It’s that Michael Leif fella,” my dad said shaking the phone in my direction.

Despite my best judgement I took the phone “Never fuckin’ call me here again,” I said before Leif could start his craziness and clicked the receiver.

“Ringo?” was all my mom said.

“Who’s Michael Leif and why won’t you talk to him?” Paris asked.

Genie caught Paris’s eye and shook her head in the universal language for shut up.

Stormy took the opportunity to steal some macaroni off Genie’s plate.

“He said,” my dad, my real dad, John Paul Langly looked at me talking slow, like one of us had suffered brain damage in the last five minutes “His father died. He said he needs you to go to New Jersey.”

“Not my problem,” I said “Seriously, not my problem.”

“Ringo,” my mom said, like I was disappointing her and being unreasonable, all in one word.  
“No Ringo nothin’,” I shook my head “All Dude’s gotta do is go to his parole officer and tell ‘em his dad died and he’s got permission to leave the state. Simple as that.”

A look came over Heidi that I recognized from the time she smacked me.

“I’m not sure if you’ve noticed but your father has some serious ...issues…”Heidi started but I cut her off.

“Got nothin’ to do with me,” I repeated.

“Let me make sure you understand what we’re talking about, Ringo,” Heidi started back in then proceeded to start counting off diagnoses on her fingers “Major clinical Depression, paranoia, obsessive compulsive disorder, agoraphobia and you think he’s just going to get on a plane for New Jersey? He hasn’t left the house in the last 4 years.”

I ran my hands over my face. This was crazy. Since when was anything having to do with Mike Leif my responsibility? I hadn’t even known the guy was still alive, much less related to me six months ago.

I was about to point that out when the phone rang again, and again my dad, my real dad, answered “Langly residence, John Langly speaking,” then motioned to Heidi “It’s your sister.” 

Holy crap, Mike Leif had called The Enemy Goldstein. He wasn’t going to give this up. He meant it.

“These are your people, Ringo,” my dad said, like that was supposed to mean something.

“Far as I’m concerned ‘my people’ are all in this room,” Technically I suppose I left out a few folks like Byers and Frohike and Mulder and Scully but that was beside the point. The point was Mike Leif was a stranger to me. I wasn’t about to go tearing off across the country because some stranger’s dad died.

Heidi covered the receiver with her palm and turned to Genie “Can you say something to him?”

Genie looked down at her plate and folded her hands in front of her “I could, but I won’t, I’m on his side. Richie doesn’t know these people, they don’t know him, it’s not like they’re going to be disappointed if he doesn’t show up. They probably couldn’t pick him out of police line up.”

Heidi closed her eyes and spoke into the receiver “Are you sure?” then to Genie “My sister, Clara, would like to speak to you.”

Fuuuuuuuuuuck.

They couldn’t convince me so they were going to try to get to Euglena. 

“Ringo,” my dad said, like that was supposed to make me change my mind.

“Ringo,” my mom said like saying my name was a valid argument.

It wasn’t like either of them had some great love for Mike Leif. I couldn’t even figure out why they cared if I went to his dad’s funeral or not.

And it occurred to me for the first time that having two parents was not advantageous when they decided to gang up on you. There was nothing I could do but go to my room and lay on my bed with my earphones in place and my mp3 player turned up all the way. I put my pillow over my face for good measure.

Heidi followed me in, of course, and unlike my dad had no respect for the silencing properties of a pillow.

“You’re being selfish,” she said.

 

“I got one question for you,” I said.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Mike Leif? Man, what were you thinking when you hooked up with him?” I asked.

“Oh that’s easy,” she said smiling a funny smile “He was the most intelligent most idealistic man I’ve ever met.”

Somehow that made me feel even more like shit. I put the pillow back over my face.  
~~

I stayed like that for maybe half an hour or so.   
Then Genie came in. I knew it was Genie from the way she sat on the floor beside the bed and put her hand on my leg. Nobody else does that.

I took a peek, there she was, pretty as always, then I went back under my pillow.  
“So? They convince you?” I asked lifting up my pillow just enough to make sure she heard me.

Genie lifted up her left hand, held it flat, and wiggled it a little, the universal sign for sitting on the fence.

“What’re you thinkin’?” I asked.

“On one hand what if we go to New Jersey and somebody recognizes you? It seems dangerous,” she said “I know it would be pretty hard for anyone to draw a connection between you and Mike Leif. He’s not on your birth certificate and you’ve got a completely different identity now anyway but you know, shit happens. I don’t want anything to happen to you, Richie.”

I shrugged kinda surprised by her assumption that she was goin’ with me if I went, but then I really wouldn’t want to go without her,“And on the other?” 

“Clara and Heidi,” Genie sighed.

“What about ‘em?” I asked.

“They think you’d get something out of meeting Mike’s family,” she said.

“Such as?” I didn’t get it. I really didn’t get it.

Genie shrugged.

“So what do you think?” I asked the only person who didn’t seem to have an agenda.

“I’m about to find out what I think” she said pulling out her cards from her purse at the foot of the bed.

Half the time I thought Genie’s cards were stupid, the other half I wasn’t so sure. Not that I said anything either way, I just watched as she shuffled. I mean, I like eating solid foods.

Genie laid down a card. There was a woman with her head in her hands and a line of swords hanging on the wall. I looked at the roman numeral on the top of the card. 9. 9 of Swords.

“What’s that mean?” I asked. I’d never done that before, ask her about the cards, but I figured since this was about me, I ought to have a right to ask.

“Welllll,” she said drawing the word out “That depends on what the rest of the cards are but generally 9 of Swords is either devastating loss or fear of devastating loss, one or the other,” Genie said looking straight at the cards not even glancing my way as she laid out a line of cards, and then a cross, and then another line.

“So?” I said.

“We need to go,” Genie said, breathing in. I took the opportunity to look down her cleavage.

“Your dad’s a basketcase, but you already knew that. Your grandmother’s heartbroken, she knows you exist ...um meeting you would make her happy, and all these Leif people…” she said, and it sounded like something from an old horror movie, Attack of the Leif People.

“They what?” I asked.

“They’re gonna love you,” she said tapping the final card.

Yeah, right, that was gonna happen.  
So much for mumbo jumbo.  
~~

The upshot being I hacked us some plane tickets and two hotel rooms, and shelled out bucks for funeral clothes for the four of us, because I wasn’t going without Genie and no way was Genie going to New Jersey without Stormy and Paris. Then Mom and Dad drove me and Genie and the Hell monkeys to Lincoln so we could catch our flight.   
It was not the spring break I’d had in mind.  
~~

On the way out of the hotel room I caught sight of myself in the mirror and I looked like a stranger. It wasn’t just the stupid short hair either. The black suit Genie had picked out and stayed up half the night altering, looked … surprisingly sharp. Suit, short hair, contacts; I didn’t look like Ringo Langly but I did look surprisingly...I dunno, okay, I guess. Genie and the girls looked so perfect you’d think I rented them for the occasion. Together in the mirror we looked like, I dunno, a family or somethin’. The only question was, if I wasn’t Ringo Langly who was I? Richard Leif? Was this what cool guy, Richard Leif, second generation revolutionary who lived his life surrounded by hot chicks; super hot wife, two pretty little girls, even his mom was a stunner, looked like?

I could see how Mike Leif’s family might give a guy like the one in the mirror a chance.

“Hey! She stepped on my foot,” Stormy yelled.

“If you didn’t stand in my way I wouldn’t have to,” Paris said.

Euglena had enough. 

“I want four feet, minimum, between you two at all times. When we get to the funeral the seating is gonna go like this; Paris, Me, Richie, Stormy. I am done with the fighting. Do you hear me? Done,”she said. Genie was extra hot when she got pissed off, as long as I wasn’t the one she was mad at. “Don’t forget your hat, Richie.”

I put it in my pocket. 

I couldn’t really say too much about the service except that Sam Leif got a pretty good turn out . I was too busy worrying what would happen when the time came for me to introduce myself. I remember Stormy pulling on my arm and whispering in my ear “This music is spooky.”

Then a minute later she added “I like it.”

At the cemetery I saw the name over and over. Lefkowicz on all sides of where they buried Mike’s dad. These were, I felt weird in the pit of my stomach, my relatives. Living and dead both. I stayed to the back but it was pretty plain, I fit in. I’d never seen so many people who looked like me before. Mostly blondes and red heads, with a random brunette here and there. Mostly built like storks. The Lefkowicz genes might leave something to be desired, aesthetically speaking, but they looked pretty fucking dominant.

It was a funny feeling to blend in. In Nebraska it was literally impossible. I wasn’t one of them and they let me know it. I don’t know why it never occurred to me my dad, might not be, you know, my biological father. In retrospect it seemed pretty obvious I wasn’t actually related to any of them. All I could say for sure was by the time I left I was so used to standing out it felt weird not to. 

 

Bit by bit the crowd thinned down to what looked like pretty much just family. People were starting to notice us. I might not be conspicuous this one time but Genie and the girls sure were. They didn’t have Indians in New Jersey, as far as I knew. I mean they did but they were...um dot not feather. I couldn’t do this. I did not have a good track record with old ladies. If I was lucky she’d only hate my guts like my...um like John Paul Langly’s mom, if not she’d tried to poison me. Okay, maybe that wasn’t too likely… still it was better to be safe than sorry. 

“Let’s go home, Genie,” I said pulling on her hand.

“We’re going home? That’s it?” Paris said looking and sounding like she was about to give me a hard time “We came all this way and you’re not even going to say hi?”

“No, we’re not going home,” Genie said “Come on, Richie,” and dragged me, literally dragged me to stand in front of the old lady in question, Mike Leif’s mother, my alleged grandmother.

“Hello,” I said and breathed in, but before I could get the next words out of my mouth she interrupted me.

“Which one of Jack’s grandkids are you? Jack,”she asked turning to the old geezer sitting a few chairs down from her, by the look of him he was some relation to her late husband “This is one of yours, right? Or is he Davey’s? I can never keep them straight.”

“I’m Mike’s kid. Michael Leif’s,” I said I wasn’t sure how many marbles she had, I wondered if maybe I should have mentioned Mike Leif being her son.  
For a minute her only response was a sharp inhalation. Then she closed her eyes for two beats.

“And this is?” she asked waving her hand at Genie and the girls.

“This is my wife, Euglena, sorry, I mean Eugenia and Paris and Stormy,” but before I could say more she cut me off again.

“What is it with my grandchildren? Can you conceive a child on vacation without announcing it to the world? Geneva? Genny,” the old broad called over her shoulder and out of the gaggle of family came a girl more or less Paris’s age, she had the misfortune to have the general family look, although softened up a little “These are your cousins,” she went on “Paris and Stormy. I got that right, right? Introduce them.”

Genie followed with her eyes as Paris and Stormy went to meet the rest of the kids.  
“And your name is?” my grandmother asked me.

“Richard,” I said “I go by Richard Black.”

The old lady covered her face with her hand for a split second, shaking her head “Your father told me he was going to call you Ernesto. Have you ever heard of such idiocy?”

“Yeah, well, I’ve got my mom to thank for... for letting me dodge that bullet,”I said.

“Your mother’s the Weiss girl, correct?”

I nodded.

“So, Black from White, very clever. May I ask how she...on second thought it would be best if I didn’t ask and you didn’t tell me,” the old lady said “May I inquire what you do for a living? Have you got a profession? Where do you live or do you want to tell me ? Your father’s been very hush hush when it comes to you. We knew you existed but...but that was about it. ”

I paused, just a second, and as I probably should have predicted, Genie jumped in.

“Richie’s a math professor in Oklahoma,” Genie said.

“Hmmm at your age already a professor? I would think a doctoral candidate, maybe,” she said.

“Richie finished high school when he was 15,” Genie said and I could feel her palm sweating. She was as nervous as I was.

The old lady nodded “I’d ask if you wanted to give your grandma a hug but we barely know eachother.”

“Yeah,” I said, relieved “I’m not really a hugger.”

“Me neither,”the old lady seemed to relax “Did you take a taxi or have you got a rental?”

“Rental,” I said.

“Good, you can follow us to the house,” she said “ My name’s Barbara by the way. Mostly they call me Barbie. Bubbie. Barbie, one of those.”

~~  
And we did, we followed them to the house. It was nicer than any Langly farm house but not obscene. Like dead center between Mulder and Langly on the continuum. We ate. The girls ran around and played with the boatload of other kids.

Barbie and I sat in Mike’s dad, Sam’s old office and talked. Not, like, what you imagine talking to your grandmother would be like, no, more like, you know, the early days with Byers and Fro, before I was familiar enough with how the guys thought to have both sides of a conversation by myself. The old lady was sharp and interesting.  
We talked politics. We talked about the history of colonial forces involvement with the oil trade. We talked about the currency market.

“Of course, in my parent’s generation they only talked about these things in the privacy of their own homes. ‘Keep your head down’ was the golden rule,” Barb said “That was what I loved about Sammy, from the start, from the first time I met him Sam never kept an opinion to himself,” she shook her head, smiling “the lengths he’d go to in order to prove a point.”

It made me wish I could have met him “Sounds like a cool guy.”

“Cool? I don’t know if I’d say that,” she said “It bit him in the backside, plenty. The whole Leif foolishness, that was one.”

“Tell me about it,” I said.

“Mikey never told you that story?” she asked and I wondered how much time she thought I’d spent with the guy.

I shook my head.

“Well, Sammy’s brother, Jack, the one in the other room eating all the coffee cake,   
had applied for a job with the state actuarial office, twice, and nothing, no interview, nothing. Sammy said it was anti-semitism. Of course, everyone said he was paranoid or if he wasn’t paranoid it didn’t matter because he’d never prove it. So what did he do? Sammy applied for the job himself, twice; once as Samuel Lefkowicz and once as Sam Leif, after Leif Erickson of all the farkakte nonsense. When Sam Leif got an interview and then another your grandfather had to furnish the paperwork, you know, so he changed his name. We only had Your Aunt Linda and your Uncle Jerry then but after he got the job we all became Leifs,” she said waving her hands to, I guess, indicate the rest of the family.

“He took the job?” I asked. I had been totally following up to that point. I mean I probably would have done something similar under the same circumstances.

“Well, the pay was good and it beat working for his uncle,” Barbie said.

I thought about it “Okay, that makes sense,” now I really wished I’d known the guy.

“When things are settled down I think I’m going to go see your father,” Barbie said sipping her coffee “How far is Oklahoma from Kansas? Maybe I’ll pop down.” 

I winced wanting to object but not sure how “Are you sure that’s a good idea? Seein’ Mike, not me, I mean, you can come see me and Genie whenever you feel like it but Mike’s kinda...” I let it hang out there, stuck for an adjective.

I couldn’t see how visiting Mike would do anyone any good, even Mike.

“You think I shouldn’t,” Barbie said.

“He was locked up a long time,” I said groping for an explanation.

“I know he’s suffered, but he’s my son,” she said “My Sammy’s grandfather’s brother, so his great uncle, Lev, spent 12 years in prison for criticizing the Polish government. They said he was so long in that tiny cell when he got out he was terrified to leave his room. The family had to coax him out with sweets so they could clean. These things happen. You think it’s better we should leave your father alone to rot?” 

I had no idea how to respond to that, it was like she hit me with a guilt ray. I struggled for something to say until there was a knock at the door to Barbie’s office.

“Barbie? Barbie?” It was a man’s voice.

“Open the door, already,” Barbie said rolling her eyes.

When the door swung wide it was not one person but 5, my age-ish, kinda unwinding from their funeral attire, shoes off, ties loose, jackets discarded.

“We, uh, wanted to, uh play a game, you know, in memorium, and well, we need Grandpa’s DM notebooks,” the one guy said, he was about my height, my size, his hair more strawberry than straight up blonde and a little thinner than mine, but all in all he looked like a variation on the theme of your truly. I mean we’d all been introduced by Barbie but to be honest they all kinda blurred together.

My dad, I mean the one who raised me, was right, these were my people. I would have said something to that effect but Barb answered him before I could say anything.

“Top left hand desk drawer,” Barb said, and I wondered if it was some universal chick quality to know where everything was “You want to use the office? You’ll be out of the way.”

The guy looked at the others and shook his head “We don’t wanna put you out.”

“You won’t be. I was going to go see my advisor at any rate,” Barbie said.

And like that all five errupted, like, like, like she had said something crazy.

“Your con artist you mean,” said one, a red head.

“Bubbie, I can’t believe an intelligent woman like you…” said the one chick in the group.

“Why, why, why,” said a blonde with his hands in the air.

“Sheesh,” said another.

The fifth just put his hands over his face.

“When you’re my age, and you’ve been in the insurance business since the dawn of time, and you’ve seen the things I’ve seen, you can tell me there’s no such thing as fate, and there’s no point in having my cards read,” Barb said.

“Wait, wait, wait!” I said holding up my hands “All uh ya.”

“Waiting,” Barbie said folding her arms across her chest.

“Go ahead,” the one chick in the group at the door, said.

It took me a second to decide what to say first “You gamers?” I said to the guys at the door.

There were nods all around “Grandpa started us out when we were in middle school as ploy to teach us about the actuarial tables,” the chick said “You?”

“Yeah,” I nodded “Mind if I sit in?”

They looked at eachother, then they looked at me and shrugged.

“Okay,” the chick, whose name I had been told at the gravesite, but could not remember, said.

Yes! I had not so much as rolled a single die since I left D.C. I felt a pre-emptory rush of anticipation.

“And on that note,” Barbie said rising from her chair .

“No, wait, I’m not done. I uh, uh, kinda got my own advisor I could lend ya. If you wanna. I mean the price is right, and by right I mean free,” I said.

“Keep talking,” Barbie said “Who is she?”

The guys at the door were looking at each other like they weren’t sure what to make of me. 

“It’s Euglena,” I said “I mean Eugenia, my wife, Genie, she reads her cards every day, more than once, usually. She’s the one that told me to come here today. I told Mike no way, no offense, I didn’t know you people from the man-in-the-moon but Genie did her cards and was all...you gotta go, Richie and…” I said starting to ramble but Barbie cut me off.

“So she’s a real one?” Barbie said and I was a little confused.

“A real psychic?” I asked.

“That I can judge for myself,” Barbie said “I mean a real gypsy.”

I didn’t laugh, but I wanted to “Um no, she’s um Indian, uh feather not dot..uh uh uh Native American I guess you’re ‘sposed to say only Genie says Indian.” Actually what Genie said was more like “In’din” definitely a two syllable word.

“For real?” Barbie said, like I told her I had married a magic wish granting fairy or some shit, which I guess, in a way, Genie was.

“Government I.D. card and everything,” I said, I knew Native Americans were kinda thin on the ground on the East Coast but it was still a pretty funny reaction.

“That’s even better than a gypsy,”Barbie said.

“You’re ‘sposed to say Roma, Grandma. They call themselves Roma,” the one chick said “Gypsy’s a slur.”

“How am I supposed to know that, Beth? Was there a memo I didn’t get? An email, maybe? It must have wound up in my junk mail folder,” Barbie said.

“If you wanna be able to complain when the guy at the post office says ‘kike’ you gotta cool it with the gypsy. Otherwise…” Beth would have gone on but Barbie cut her off.

“Otherwise I’m a big fat hypocrite, so Roma not gypsy, I got it. Happy now?” Barbie said with a wave of her hand “Richard,” she turned to me “Bring me that wife of yours. You little momzers can play in the kitchen. You’ll like that, you’ll be closer to the food.”

“I’ll be right back,” I said, taking off at a dead run to find Genie.  
~~  
I looked in the living room, the girls were with a collection of other kids and fairly easy to spot, being well, a completely different color than any of ‘em. They were huddled over what looked like two risk boards taped together, with the usual armies and game pieces as well as some stolen from other games; a shoe, a little metal dog, Emperor Palpatine. 

“You seen your mom?” I asked as Paris stared squinty-eyed at the board.

“Do you mind? I’m trying to play here,” Paris waved me off without even looking my way.

Some day we were gonna have a talk about that kid’s manners. I didn’t say it out loud, though, because I didn’t want her to flip me off in front of a room full of kids.

Luckily Stormy was on my side “She’s outside smoking.”

“Thanks,” I said and raced for the backyard.

Euglena was out there smoking with...some people. Older than me, younger than Barbie, and they all had that Leif/Lefkowicz/stork look.

“Hey, Richie,” Genie said sucking so the tip of her cigarette burned bright for a second “You okay?”

Before I describe what happened next in my defense I would like to say me and Genie hadn’t been married that long and seein’ her with less make up and less skin showing than usual... it sorta did something to me. I mean, she was always hot. Always. 

But at that second the sun was going down and Genie wasn’t wearing much make-up, in her kinda plain black dress, with the wind whipping her long black hair around, I sorta forgot why I was there. I thought a bunch of things at once; that Genie was so beautiful, like, naturally, like the most beautiful girl I ever knew, I also realized that Genie still scared me, you know, a lot, Genie looked like a witch, the hot kind and that instead of making them less noticeable covering up tits as big as Genie’s made them more conspicuous, not less. My dick got real hard real fast and I had to fight the urge to throw myself at her feet then and there.

Down, Boy.

“Richie?” Genie repeated. 

“Yeah?” later Genie told me I was grinning a goofy grin at her when I said it.

“Did you want something?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah, uh Barbie wants to see you. Bring your purse,” I said.

“Huh?” Genie said the bridge of her nose wrinkling up. It sure was cute when she did that.

“Umm she wants you to,” all of a sudden I got confused and had to force myself to try and think straight “Uh, do the card deal.”

“Excuse me?” Genie said and I could see it, she was starting to get pissed off and I had no idea why.

“If you don’t she’s gonna go to her regular, uh psychic, whatever, and Beth... my cousin Beth says she’s a total con artist. So will you come do your deal...please,” I said. 

Genie didn’t seem real convinced but two more drags and she said “Okay. Fine, I hope you haven’t talked me up too much.”

“Cool,” I said breathing out a sigh of relief “I’m gonna go play D&D. You don’t happen to know what we got in savings?” 

“Richie!” Genie said like she was ready to sock me one.

“I ain’t gonna lose it, keep your panties on,” I said and she did sock me, in the shoulder, but not very hard.   
~~

I hadn’t played in months, the longest stretch since I was 15, which might have been why I was having such a great time. The Leifs talked more shit than any group of gamers I’d ever heard. Still it was fucking great.

Not like I’d known ‘em all my life, exactly. More like I should have known ‘em all my life, or maybe like, it didn’t matter that I hadn’t known ‘em the day before, I fit right in anyway.

The question was, how much of me was you know DNA, how much was how I was brought up and all the things that had happened to me since, and how much was just me? I couldn’t even begin to unravel it.

“So,” one of the guys, I had to remind myself he was my first cousin, said all shifty peeking at the other four. His name was Adam or, you know, Lord Bearslayer.

“So,” said Malachite the dwarf prince aka Jeff, licking his lips.

Beth, the Dungeon Master, or Mistress or whatever, pushed up her glasses and said, her shoulders hunched forward. Beth slouched something fierce “What the rest of your party would like to know, Manhammer, is where you grew up. If we’re allowed to know, that is?”

“What do you mean ‘if we’re allowed to know’? What that hell is that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“I mean, it was always this big mystery ‘where’s Ernie?’ it only follows we were…” she started but I cut her off for clarification.

“Wait, wait, wait, you guys knew about me? You knew I existed?” I asked, choosing not to comment on the “Ernie” aspect of the story.

“You mean Bubbie didn’t tell you?” Prunesquallor the Healer aka Steve said, like there was something to tell.

“Tell me what? I asked.

“Okay,” Beth said, grabbing a handful of peanuts “Goes like this your dad, Uncle Mike went out West to grad school and nobody hears from him for a while, but what do you expect he’s a grad student, then one day Sam and Barbie get a call. He’s met a girl, not just any girl, she’s got it all,brains beauty blah blah blah plus she’s Jewish. And get this, they’re engaged. Sam and Barbie are beside themselves. Over the moon. There’s some squabbling between the two families about where they’re going to have the wedding; the Weisses are allegedly loaded and most of the Leifs won’t be able to afford a trip to California. Then they get another call from Uncle Mike, the big wedding is off. They don’t want to wait that long, the rich girl from California is pregnant. They’ll get married in Jersey during winter break. Their flight is on Christmas Eve because it’s the cheapest day of the year to fly. Only instead of making their connecting flight they get off in Denver and blow up a munitions factory. Sam and Barbie didn’t hear from Mike for almost five years after that.”

“When he was arrested,” I said, everything fit so far , although I’d imagined Mike and Heidi’s relationship was more...uh….casual than the way Beth described it.

It was Prunesquallor’s turn to jump in “So the first thing Sam wants to know is where’s the kid? Only Uncle Mike won’t tell. He’s sure the phones are bugged, guards are everywhere, which okay, maybe, but Bubbie and Sam are worried, it’s a crazy world out there and they have a grandson they’ve never seen, who knows if he’s safe or being taken care of. Uncle Mike gives up stonewalling and tells Sam and Bubbie Little Ernesto is on a commune in Oregon, then he says he’s living with Black Panthers in Watts or maybe Chicago. It’s all so crazy and Sam’s so desperate he hires a private detective.”

“Which ate up a boatload of cash,”Malachite the Dwarf said “Bearslayer, you’re the accountant, do you know how much they spent, all together?”

Bearslayer didn’t even pause, he had the figures in his head “An average of 5,000 dollars a year for 10 years.”

“That adjusted?” I asked.

“Nope,” Bearslayer said.

“And the psychics, don’t forget the psychics,” said Corvus the Mage aka Nate aka the one quiet one in the bunch.

“I got no numbers for that, that’s Bubbie’s private account,” Bearslayer said shaking his head “Nobody sees that but Barbie and God.” 

“So,” Prunesquallor said.

“Do you mind if we ask you a few questions?” Beth asked pulling out another notebook and flipping to the back “We’ve got a couple of bets going on.”

On one hand it was a hell of a thing to put money down on, on the other I probably would have done the same thing myself.

“As a kid did you ever spend time on a hippy commune?” Corvus the Mage asked. 

“Uh...no,” I said and watched as Prunesquallor pulled three crisp 20s out of his wallet and handed them to Corvus.

Then it was Malachite the dwarf prince’s turn “Did you at any time find refuge on a friendly Indian reservation?”

I shook my head.

“Think hard about that one,” Malachite urged me.

“Never happened,” I said “Sounds fun, though.”

“Are you sure?” Malachite Dwarf Prince said.

“Yeah, I think I’d remember,” I said.

“Man,” Malachite said handing Beth and Bearslayer two 20 dollar bills a piece.

Bearslayer leaned forward resting his chin in his palm “White child in the ghetto, kept safe by Uncle Mike’s friends in the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam.”

“Noooooooooooooooooo,” I said laughing because it was so fucking absurd. And I thought I stuck out like a sore thumb in Nebraska.

“It woulda been cool though,” Bearslayer said, laying three 20s each on Beth, Malachite, Corvus the Mage, and Prunesquallor the Healer without blinking.

“So where did you grow up? If you’re allowed to tell us,” Beth said trying not to look too interested.

I thought about it for a second. There was no feasible way to connect me, their cousin, Richard George Black with Ringo Langly.

“I spent the first 15 years of my life on a dairy farm in Nebraska,” I said, confident no one had guessed even close.

“Seriously?” Bearslayer asked.  
Prunesquallor turned to Beth “Does Nebraska count as the midwest? I thought it was more of a Plains State.”

“Don’t you try to weasel out of…” Beth said sticking her finger in his face.

“I’m not trying to weasel out of anything, Bethy, it’s a valid geographical question,” Prunesquallor said.

“Valid geographical question, my ass, pay up,” Beth said.

“First define the term midwest,” Prunesquallor said.

“East of California and West of Philadelphia North of Mexico South of Canada,” Beth said.

“Small wonder Bethy crapped out in the second round of that middle school geography bee,” Bearslayer muttered.

“I think we gotta have Manhammer arbitrate on this one,”Malachite Prince of Dwarves said, squinting at me.

And like that they all turned to yours truly, the stakes had to be pretty high for the two of them to raise such a stink. I swallowed hard and told the truth, there wasn’t anything else I could do. 

“There’s a world of difference between some place like Ohio and Nebraska. The midwest is all wholesome and pastoral and The Plains are flat and nothin’ and where like joy goes to die. Sorry, man, but Nebraska ain’t the midwest,” I said.

“I shoulda known,” Beth said throwin’ her hands in the air “Leif boys always stick together.”

Prunesquallor put his arm around Beth’s shoulders and “It’s not so bad, Sis, you’re a Leif boy, too.”

“Thanks a lot,” Beth said, rolling her eyes “Does that mean you’re not gonna make me pay?”

“Dream on,” Prunesquallor said.

“I could spot you if you need me to, “ I said feeling guilty.

“It’s the principle…” Beth said but Prunesquallor cut her off.

“The principle being that my sister is a cheapskate and a sore loser,”

“Here,” Beth said throwing a five at her brother.

“Five dollars?” I couldn’t help myself, I freaked a little “A five buck bet over where I was in hiding for the first 15 years of my life? Barbie woulda bet more than that,”

All of ‘em, and I do mean every single one of the Leif boys, including Beth, started laughing.

“What did I say?” I asked.

“I’m not in Bubbie’s league and I don’t wanna be,” Beth said.

“Huh?” It was all I could say.

“Bubbie’s been banned from Harrah’s, Vegas and Atlantic City,” Corvus the Mage said.

“What for?” I asked.

“Counting cards,” Bearslayer said “what else?”

Oh yeah, that was my grandmother, alright.   
~~  
It turned into an all nighter without me even noticing. I figured Genie knew where I was and we were all in the same house so… okay I didn’t even bother to think about it. I played, I laughed, I lost a shit load of cash and won it all back and then some.   
Some time right before dawn little feet came padding into the kitchen, I looked up and there was Stormy looking sleepy and confused in the doorway.

“Have you seen Paris?” she asked all groggy.

I looked over the usual D&D debris covering the table a little distracted “She’s probably with your mama.”

“No, we were all asleep in the bed together and now Paris is gone,” Stormy said rubbing her eyes with one hand and scratching her ass with the other. Paris had all the couth, apparently.

“She probably went to the head...the bathroom. She probably got up to pee,” I said planning my next move now that I’d survived the goblin attack relatively unscathed.

“I checked there first,” Stormy said.

I had only been halfway listening up to that point but the minute I realized Paris wasn’t in the bathroom and she wasn’t with Genie it occurred to me it was 4 a.m., no one knew where the kid was, and she was 1500 miles from home. And she was 11.

Fuck.

I stood up “Wait ‘til I get back. No game play without me.”

“Screw that,” Bethy said “We’ll help you look.”

“Less interruption that way,” Prunesquallor said.

“Much quicker,” Malachite said.

Corvus shrugged “I was lookin’ forward to talkin’ shit about you while you were gone.”

Bearslayer reached out across the table and sort of thumped Corvus on the side of the head. Corvus reached out and popped Bearslayer in retaliation. 

Malachite the Dwarf Prince, who was probably the tallest one of them, us actually, forcibly reached into the middle before it could escalate, but not before Corvus could reach out to Bearslayer one more time and “Owwww he pinched me, did you see that, he pinched me,” Bearslayer shreiked.

“You gonna tell mom?” Corvus grinned when he said it.

I was already to the doorway when it occurred to me they could use some instruction, they’d probably never conducted a search before.

“This is what we’re gonna do, everybody take a room, search every space small enough for her to hide in,” I said “When you’ve completely searched one room, move on to the next one that hasn’t been gone through yet.”

“Why would she hide?” Bearslayer asked.

“Hell if I know,” I said.  
We didn’t find Paris but we hadn’t been looking for more than a couple of minutes when Bethy came running up to me “I didn’t find her but I found this.”

A Yatzee score sheet and on the back it read MEET ME IN THE CLUBHOUSE TONIGHT and under that in a different much neater printing AS SOON AS I CAN GET AWAY, MY SISTER’S A LIGHT SLEEPER.

“That might not even be her, “ Prunesquallor said.

“One way to know for sure,” I said “Where’s the clubhouse?”

“Side of the house, you can’t see it from the back porch,” Bearslayer said.

And like that I was running for the backyard.  
~~  
I don’t know what I was expecting but it was the kind of thing kids build with no adult supervision. It was old, for sure, but clearly recently built onto, with buttresses to keep the walls standing and a tarp over the top to stop leaks. A crappy ongoing generational work in progress.

I opened the door. Or I tried to open the door but it was both stuck at the bottom and not very well attached at the hinges. The upshot was once I got it unstuck the door fell off.

There was Paris. Paris in nothing but her panties and holding her jacket over her chest.

And a boy. The boy didn’t have a shirt on and he was trying desperately to pull up his pants. He looked 15 or 16. Small for his age, with curly brown hair and fuck… suddenly I was channeling Melvin Frohike because I grabbed the kid by his ear and dragged him out into the yard.

“Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow,” the kid squealed. Good.

“What the fuck do you fucking think you are fucking doing with a fucking 6th grader?” I said. Okay, I may have got a little loud, the neighborhood lights were blinking on one by one.

“6th grader?” the kid said blinking furiously “She said was 16.”

“She’s not, she’s 11,” I said twisting the kid’s ear a little more.

“Ooow,”the kid yowled “She looks 16.” Which might have been true but that didn’t make her not 11. 

Paris, bein’ Paris, had to say somethin’.

 

“You and my mother treat me like a child,” Paris said, indignant, like I oughta apologize, put the door back on its hinges, and let her and this kid, whoever he was, have at it.

I dragged the kid by his ear as I rounded on Paris “We treat you like a little kid because you are a little kid. Get over it. You wanna impress people with how mature you are? Pay a bill. Do your homework without bein’ badgered...hell... pick up after yourself every once in a while.”

“You. Are. So. Full. Of. Shit. Mom is the one who does all that stuff,” Paris said wearing her jacket, backwards to cover her, you know, chest.

“Yeah, and she’s a grown up,” I yelled. I had completely lost it. I was mad at Paris but I was also scared shitless on her behalf. What did she think she was doin’? She was a baby. None of this would have happened if she was a boy. Why, why, why did girls have to be so … difficult? Was it Paris’s fault or was it the world’s? Fuck if I knew. All I knew was when me and Genie had a baby it was gonna be a boy.

“Oh really?” said the queen of sass “Grandma says when my mom was my age she…”

It was one of Genie and Jimmy’s only serious differences of opinion, Jimmy letting Genie’s mom come see the girls. When we got back to Oklahoma he was going to be forced to reconsider his position on that one.

“I don’t know what that old bag told you but when your mom was your age she wasn’t sneakin’ around with some half-grown kid, she was raped, by a grown man, her own mom’s husband. And your grandma, that, that, bitch said it was her own fault. So check your sources, dumbass, before you start tellin’ me about Genie Black Star,” I was screamin’ at the top of my lungs at that point.

It was about that time I realized pretty much everybody who had been in the house was now in the backyard. Oh shit.

“Richie?” It was Genie standing behind me and her voice was quavering “Richie? Ease off.”

I turned around, still keeping hold of the kid’s ear. Genie was bawlin’, tears streamin down her face. I’d never seen that before. 

“Let him go,” she said sniffling and reached out and sort of peeled my fingers off the kid’s ear “What’s your name?” she asked the kid.

“Marshall,” the boy said rubbing his ear.

“Marshall Hoffman,” Bearslayer said “He’s um our cousin, me and Jeff and Nate’s. Our mom’s brother’s kid. You know; second family.”

“How old are you?” Genie asked.

“15,” he said.

“You look Paris up in about 10 years, okay,” Genie said wiping her eyes, but the tears kept coming “Richie, put the door back so she can get dressed.”

“Genie, baby, I’m sorry...I …I….”fuck I had no idea what I was supposed to say so I leaned the door back against the frame.

“It’s 4:30 in the morning and I’m entirely too old for this business. Marshall, you’re supposed to be at your Grandma Ida’s on the corner, sneak back in before I call your father. Everyone else, go inside unless you’re directly involved,” Barbie said. She was wearing a thick green bathrobe and slippers.

Genie had run out in her pjs and so had Stormy. Stormy was shivering. It was cold.

“It’s too cold out here, Stormageddon, go inside with Barbie, okay?” I told her.

“What about Mama?” she said, and it was a fair question.

“I’ll take care of your mama, okay? Go inside,” I said and I was grateful she didn’t want to argue with me.

Genie meanwhile was standing there, crying louder, her shoulders shaking up and down. I wanted to put my arms around her, but I wasn’t sure if she’d appreciate the gesture. I wasn’t even 100% sure why she was crying. I didn’t know what to do but Hell, it wasn’t like she had anyone else. Carefully I put my arms around her back and braced myself, ready to be shoved away. Instead she cried even harder, sort of throwing herself against me.

“I’m the worst mom in the world,” she cried into my chest.

“How do you figure? This is not, this is not your fault,” I said kinda petting the top of her head.

“Then whose fault is it? She was,” Genie said sobbing harder into my chest “She was trying to be like me.”

“No way, that isn’t you. Not the real you. She was, like, trying to be the fucked up version of you your mom handed to her,” I said petting her head some more.

“Richie, you don’t know, after, you know after my step dad did what he did, I figured, you know, everybody said I was a slut, I might as well live up to my reputation,” Genie said holding onto me “I mean, they were gonna say it whether it was true or not, why not do the things they were accusing me of.”

“You were just a kid,” I said rocking her back and forth “With nobody watching out for you. It’s not your fault, kids do dumb shit, it’s what makes ‘em kids. The difference is Paris, she’s got actual adult supervision. She can’t make the same mistakes you did, she’ll have to come up with her own,” I said and Genie laughed a little. 

“Paris, baby, come on out. I’m not gonna punish you. I figure you’ve been humiliated enough,” Genie said still leaning against my chest “I know I have.”

“I’m, I’m sorry, I wasn’t tryin’ to embarrass you,” I said still holding her “I just got carried away.”

“I know, Richie,” Genie said wiping her tears on my shirt.

Then when Paris tried to come out of the ramshackled clubhouse the front door fell again, with a crash. She looked at me like she wanted to mount my head on a pike.

Genie laughed, for real.

“Man, she is gonna be a bitch to ride home with,” I whispered in Genie’s ear and she laughed even harder.

“Hey, at least she’ll be grown in another 7 years,” Genie said and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.


	9. Another Hotel Room- Another Town

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things come full circle, or something close to it.

I did learn to get to sleep cuddled up with Eugenia but I still woke up fucking amazed that she was there. The first week of May was shaping up to be one of the best weeks of my life. We flew out to San Francisco so I could present my dissertation. A slot opened up early. I gave my talk 2 days ahead of schedule and comped me and Genie a room upgrade. The two of us had room service breakfast and put the plates on the floor when we were done and went back to rolling around and watching tv.

“I don’t know how you can be so fucking relaxed,” she said her black hair fanned out on the white hotel sheets. Real people didn’t look that good naked but I could adapt to that. 

I couldn’t help but laugh rubbing my face against her thigh “Nah man, me relaxed? No way. I just know Vorodowski is all. He’d let me know if I had anything to worry about.”

“Know how? Like from before? You aren’t worried he’s going to tell someone who you really are?” Genie asked half sitting up on her elbows.

I laughed some more “Nah, Me and Lev, we go way back. Like before before. Lev was my R.A. Bought me my first beer when I aced my calculus final. Helped clean me up when I puked after.”

“R. A.? What’s that stand for anyway? Rat’s ass? You sure do trust this guy considering he could screw you four ways to Christmas if he wanted to,” she said sitting up.

“Resident Administrator. It’s like a senior or a grad student who watches over the peon undergrads in the dorms and makes sure they don’t get too outta hand. Lev wouldn’t fuck with me,” I said “He knows what happens to people who screw me over.”

“Don’t try to sound like a badass, Richie, ‘cause you are not a badass,” Eugenia said laughing so hard her tits shook.

“You tell that to the guy who got audited by the IRS after he told the rest of the floor I grabbed his ass in the shower when I wouldn’t carry him through his calc homework, fuckin’ asshole,” I said breathing in the scent of her pussy while I rubbed my face against her umm the technical word is mons pubis. 

“It’s not like you kicked his ass or anything,” Genie said her voice trailing off when I ran my tongue from her clit down to her perineum.

“You ever been audited?” I asked her, teasing her clit with my thumb. Six months of pretty much daily practice and my kung fu was not to be underestimated.

I can’t say I wasn’t damn proud of the amount of effort it took for Genie to answer me, her voice all breathy “I think you have to make money to get audited.”

“It’s like spending six months in traction while Uncle Sam looks up your ass with a periscope,” I said, her clit between my thumb and forefinger. I watched it swell and stand up. The female body was fucking fascinating. I couldn’t help myself, I took a lick.

“Goddamn, Richie,” Genie said falling back on the bed. 

I licked the little pink point three more times and watched as her back started to arch. Her pussy was so wet it was shining and I licked my little finger and gently, carefully slipped it into her ass, then, maybe a little less carefully inserted one finger, then two into her pussy. I don’t know about any other chicks but double penetration did it for Genie. Every. Damn. Time. I pressed my tongue against her clit and felt Genie’s pussy tighten around my fingers. Her legs started to tremble and if Genie plugged into the wall she’d be shooting sparks.

I remembered, almost laughing, a cross-stitched sampler from the kitchen when I was a kid, it had probably been there since the Franklin administration . WELL BEGUN IS HALF DONE and smiled as I kissed an invisible midline up the center of Genie’s body, up her belly, then her sternum, then the hardest choice I had to make was which tit to suck first which as fried as my brain had been over the last couple months was a fucking welcome change.

I sucked the left one first, the nipple as big as the first joint in my little finger, the right one overflowing my hand. Fuck. Then I sucked the right one. I kissed my way up her neck until my mouth was behind her ear. Man, I loved the delicate little parts of her body, her ears, her tiny feet, even the way her pinky fingers curved inward.

Fuck, yes.

“Hey, Euglena,” I whispered in her ear, kissing her jaw, her cheek, the corner of her mouth, and then kissed her lips.

“Yeah, Richie,” she said then kissed me again.

“I uhh,” I said scared to say what was on my mind so I kissed her again “I’m gonna have my doctorate after this. I know we, um, we haven’t talked about it much but if you uh you’d like to have that kid now I’d be cool with it. So, uh, we could get started on that, if you wanna.”

“You mean it, Richie? ‘Cause you know I wanna,” Genie said her hands in my hair pulling my face back to hers as my cock stabbed against her thigh “I wanna have your baby, Richie.”

 

I nodded “Me, too.” Uh maybe that came out wrong.

Genie giggled “I know what you mean.”

 

I felt my face turning red and so I focused instead on, you know, doing the deed. It was all I could do under the circumstances. It frustrated me that I still fumbled every once in a while but shit, I tried again and there I was, inside her, wet and snug and I slid my hand between us, in case I wasn’t hitting her clit right. 

Fuck that was good.  
Her tongue was in my mouth and her arms were wrapped around my back and jesus, I didn’t care what else happened in the future, right now I had Euglena.

Then there was a knock on the door “Housekeeping,” somebody said on the other side of the door.

“Go away,” I yelled breaking the kiss.

“Housekeeping,” the voice said rapping on the door again.

“Go the fuck away!” I shouted sitting up so I could watch my cock sliding in and out of Genie my hand still there, still trying to make her come again.

“Come on, Baby, I know you can do it again, come on, come for me, Baby,” I said fucking her, rubbing her clit, wanting to feel her come, wanting to see her come one more time before lunch. What can I say? I’ve always been kinda demanding.

I raised her little legs onto my shoulders and leaned forward, moving my hand to the back of her calf, and slamming her body on body. And, like that, she was coming and then because she was coming I started coming, too. 

The door flew open, and there, in my hotel room, dressed in maintenance uniforms were Byers and Frohike.

“Fuuuuck,” I said trying to cover my face with the sheet out of sheer fucking embarrassment, except that Genie was trying to grab the same part of the same sheet and I was still midsploodge, shooting all over the bed, and Genie. I think I even got some on the wall.

At least Byers had the decency to put his hand over his eyes while I wiped my dick on the edge of the sheet.

“For God’s sake put some clothes on, Ringo,” Byers said. 

Genie gave me a look “Ringo? Doesn’t anybody call you by your real name?” she said yanking on the sheet.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, people call me Ringo, I mean, what’s a nickname’s for if ya don’t use it?” I said making for my pants on the floor. I had to have some jeans somewhere in that hotel room. Shit, did Genie fold them up and put them in the official “dirty” side of the suitcase?

Frohike, the asshole, stood there laughing “Skinner told us you were defending your dissertation today, me and Byers thought we’d come wish you luck but it looks to me like you already got lucky.”

That cracked him up but good.  
Like I said, the guy is an asshole, even if he is one of my two best friends in the world.

“Yeah, well, there was an empty slot in the schedule and I got in a day a early, so uh, me and umm Eugenia and I, thought we’d use our hotel room the way God and Howard Johnson intended,” I said, standing bare-ass naked over our suitcase trying to find my damn pants “Man, Euglena, what the fuck did you do with my jeans?”

“Dammit, Richie, you gotta be lookin’ right at ‘em,” Genie said hopping out of bed, the sheet draped around her like a toga. 

“Richie?” Byers repeated, with a little laugh like it was funny, but at least Genie found me a pair of jeans.

“Guys,” I said pulling up my pants “This is Euglena. Euglena, these are the guys...John Byers - Melvin Frohike.”

“Pardon our intrusion, Miss,” Byers said.

“Missus,” I said before Genie could start waving her ring at them.

“Excuse me, my mistake,” Byers said eyes wide like somebody hit him upside the head with a plank.

Meanwhile Fro’ was standing there laughing like it was all some big damn joke.

“Yeah, we thought your love slave here fell asleep with the pay-per-view on,” Fro’ said “We didn’t want him to miss his presentation.” 

Genie looked the guys over, wiping cum off her cheek “No, that was us …it’s nice to meet you.Don’t take this any kinda way but I’m gonna grab a shower,” then went back to the suitcase and pulled out my Witch Finder General shirt “Put on your shirt, Richie.”

Then, true to form, she disappeared into the bathroom, taking both suitcases with her, at least she gave me my clothes first.

Frohike was still laughing.

“I don’t see what’s so funny,” I said pulling my shirt on over my head.

“If anybody told me the next time I saw you, you’d have some Korean cutie bent like a safety pin…” Fro’ snorted laughing so hard he was sputtering.

“Native American!” Genie yelled from the other side of the bathroom door.

“I beg your pardon, Beautiful,” Fro’ shouted at the door. 

“Happens all the time,” Genie shouted back.

“And she’d have a ring through your nose,” Fro said dropping his voice and his smile “I can’t claim to understand it, but I got to hand it to you, Blondie, I’m impressed. That’s one hot little tamale. Same one you brought to our room the last time we saw you, isn’t she?”

I shrugged “Yeah.”

“Now explain it to me,” Fro said, deadly serious “Explain how a guy like you gets a chickadee like that.” 

I didn’t know how to answer that, I mean, yeah, Genie was way hot, the dumb part was I wasn’t sure how much that part mattered to me anymore. I mean, I was more impressed with the way she always knew where everything was both in my office and at home.

Okay, maybe that was a lie. Maybe they both ran neck and neck. A great rack AND she kept me from losing my job on a regular basis…plus you wouldn’t think to look at her but she could open her mouth really wide and …

“I was nice to her?” it was more of a question than an answer, fuck if I knew how I wound up married to Genie, aside from the fact that I asked her.

“Bullshit, Blondie, last time we saw you you were a 32 year old virgin who still thought girls had cooties, 10 months later you’re in a hotel room with a beautiful woman tryin’ out for the x-rated Olympics...so what gives? How does that happen?” Fro said grilling me.

“Kinda like learning to drive from Mario Andretti, I guess,” I said looking for a metaphor that worked.

Fro’ snorted and Byers had the decency to look embarrassed about the whole thing but Genie, man, Genie, opened the door with a towel wrapped around her, barely covering her tits and her little shaved pussy, man I didn’t want the guys gettin’ any more of a look at that than they’d already had.

“Since you asked; I was stripping in a club, Richie paid me a hundred and thirty bucks to sit on his lap for 33 minutes, but I was fucked up, I nodded off on his lap, lost my job, and Richie here took me to his place, helped me get clean and never asked for so much as a look at my tits. I mean, yeah, he’s nice to me. He’s nice to my kids even when they’re being little shits. But the real deal is this; he’s the most decent guy I’ve ever known. He does the right thing without like, looking for what he can get out of it. How can you not fall in love with that? You know what I mean? I’d have to be a real chump not to marry him when he asked, does that make it clear enough for you?” Genie said.

“Crystal,” Frohike said nodding. Byers looked like he didn’t know what to say.

“Good,” Genie said “ Cause if you’re gonna threaten me like Richie’s other friend…”

“Threaten you?” Fro repeated like it had never crossed his mind.

“What other friend?” Byers asked.

“Mulder,” I said my hand over my face.

“Fox Mulder threatened you?” Byers repeated, like he couldn’t believe it “Langly, is this true?”

“Mulder knew you were getting nookie and he didn’t tell us? His ass is grass,” Frohike said.

I opened my mouth and closed it again “It ain’t like a told him, you know how spooky the guy is.”

“And the threats?” Byers said, always quick to come to some chick’s defense.

While I was trying to think of a way to put it Genie jumped in.

“He didn’t want to see Richie get hurt. It wasn’t the worst thing anybody’s ever said to me,” she said “Look, I’m gonna get that shower now.”

“Thanks for clearing things up, Sweetheart,” Fro said.

“Anytime, Mr. Frohike,” Genie said shutting the door.

I looked from Byers to Frohike and back again as the shower started “Cut the shit, guys, what are you doin’ here? And I know it ain’t checkin’ up on my sex life. Or my academic career.”

Byers looked at Frohike. Frohike looked at Byers.

“Ringo, we’re bored,” Byers said like a kid stuck inside on a rainy day.

“It’s definitely a low risk high reward venture,” Hickey said.

“In and out then back to the relative safety of our day-to-day lives,” John-boy said.

“Instead of publishing the info ourselves we send it straight to a dozen different papers at once,” Fro said and it didn’t sound…bad.

“We need your expertise,” Byers said.

“You may be a dumbass but your kung fu …” Fro said.

“Say it,” I said, because I had him, I definitely had him.

“It’s the best, man,” Fro said.

“Okay, but I think I gotta check with Genie first,” I said, “she’ll kick my ass into next week if I don’t warn her and she winds up having to bail me out of jail.”

Fro’ made a noise like a whip “And so it begins,” he smirked.

“Say what you want, dude, but bein’ pussy-whipped has excellent fringe benefits,” I said wishing Genie thought to leave me socks.

“Smart move, Richie,” Genie shouted from the shower.

Man, that chick had ears like a beagle. 

“You guys are never gonna guess what I uncovered,” I said searching the bedding for my socks from the day before, kinda hoping against hope they were wrapped up in a blanket, even though Genie would definitely not approve.

“What’s the category?” Byers asked “Current or historical?”

“Recent history,” I said. Score! I found one dirty sock, now all I needed was another one.

“Nature of the conspiracy?” Byers asked.

“Yeah, Are we talking political or corporate or….”Fro trailed off clearly thinking hard.

“How recent are we talking, Ringo? What decade?” Byers asked.  
I stopped and thought of the best way to put it without giving too much away.

“Political in origin with a start date of Dec 24th, 1968,” I said putting on the sock I had.

“Got a location for this conspiracy?” Fro asked.

I wondered how many clues I ought to give them “How ‘bout three?” I said “I’ll give ya the first two first.”

Hickey rolled his eyes “I hope you’re havin’ fun because this is a stupid game so far.”

“Portland, Oregon and Denver, Colorado. Denver, Colorado December 24th, 1968,” I said, they were never gonna get it.

Hickey squinted “So the Christmas eve. munitions plant bombing.”

“I’m assuming you named Portland because the bombers were all enrolled at Reed College,” Byers said.

“What’s the third location?” Fro’ asked.

“Saltville, Nebraska,” I said trying to keep a straight face “You’re never gonna get it.”

 

~ Finis~

Author’s Note: Thank You for reading


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